“Suddenly, nobody liked us”: What a decade of Brexit taught Britain’s scaling founders

A decade ago, Leicester City beat 5,000-to-one odds to win the Premier League, British Home Stores entered administration and the world mourned the loss of music icon David Bowie. However, for the UK, 2016 was defined by the crescendo of the Brexit referendum and its outcome.

Since the vote of 23 June that year, critics and proponents of the break from Europe have scarcely stopped debating its impact. For many of the business leaders we’ve heard from, it’s been a bruising period of uncertainty, lost momentum and added bureaucracy.

From the moment of the result, business leaders craved clarity. There was an agonising 1,653-day period between the referendum vote and when the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) took effect on 1 January 2021. Yet still, it felt like not enough time for UK businesses to prepare for the reset of trading and migration with the EU.

“So many firms postponed investment because of the uncertainty,” says professor Davide Castellani, head of international business and strategy at Henley Business School. Data from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that investment was reduced by between 12 and 18 per cent, and employment and productivity by 3 to 4 per cent.

He also points to estimates from the London School of Economics, which indicate the TCA caused around 16,400 UK firms (or 14 per cent of UK exporters to the EU) to stop serving the EU market, and around 9,900 UK businesses to stop importing altogether.

Operations that used to be straightforward now require more time, people, paperwork and explanation. Cross-border shipments now come with various costly new compliance standards.

“These fixed costs are the worst thing for a small firm, because whether you do a big shipment or a small shipment, that cost is the same,” says Castellani. “That has hit a lot of small firms.”

Nishith Rastogi, co-founder and CEO at Locus, an agentic AI transportation management system, says that Brexit’s impact was felt most clearly in the way supply chains had to be redesigned. “Previously, UK and European operators used to look at that as one logistics network,” he says. “But now, effectively, it became two separate graphs connected by a corridor. The number of warehouses increased, the number of stocking points increased and there were more operational edges. It got both fragmented and replicated.”

For recruiter The Sterling Choice, most of its business comes from food and beverage manufacturers seeking talent. That means recruiting for the initial stages of harvesting or meat processing, all the way through to placement on store shelves, with clients including the likes of M&S and Morrisons. This broad visibility of the supply chain gave co-founder Lukas Vanterpool a first-hand look at the impact of voting to leave.

“I remember speaking to a lot of our customers at the time,” he recalls. “The scariest part is nobody had a clue what was actually going to happen, or what to expect.”

“Suddenly, nobody liked us”

The Brexit process is estimated to have reduced the UK’s productivity by between 2 and 5 per cent over the three years following the referendum. That impact was felt right at the top of the ladder, too. Executive productivity was hit hard by trying to adapt to the changing environment.

A 2019 study from the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that over 70 per cent of both CEOs and CFOs reported spending time on Brexit planning and 6 per cent of CEOs and 10 per cent of CFOs spent six hours or more a week on the preparations.

Investment appetite from the continent took a hit along the way. Bristol-based advanced manufacturing company Q5D was launching in the uncertain aftermath of the vote. “It was always on our risk register as something that was going to be problematic,” Stephen Bennington, the company’s co-founder and CEO, says of Brexit. “Nothing changed immediately, but the atmosphere did. Suddenly, nobody liked us.”

As a venture-backed business, the company needed investment, partners and access to international markets. But, as Bennington says, Brexit made European engagement much harder.

“It was very difficult to get calls from German and French investment houses,” he says. “Our first investor was American. To this day, 60 per cent of our investment is American, 30 per cent is UK, and 10 per cent is Japanese. We still haven’t had a European investor.”

Vanterpool and his team at The Sterling Choice also noticed a difference in attitude straight after the vote when it came to hiring candidates for customers.

“Our customers second- or third-guessed every candidate they looked to bring in,” he says. “Margins got squeezed, not because of a lack of talent, but due to the rising costs of ingredients, the whole supply chain piece, logistics and all of that.”

The impact was stark for businesses that relied heavily on a European talent pool. “Post-Brexit, we lost a lot of very good Italian, Spanish and Polish workers,” says Matt Hunt, co-founder of The Protein Ball Co.

“I think some felt they weren’t welcome in the country anymore, which was something that we heard a lot.”

Pivoting to opportunity

UK businesses and industries were forced to pivot and unearth opportunities. The Protein Ball Co discovered a gem in an unlikely place. “We met a distributor in the Balearics,” recalls Hunt. “We looked at the population of Mallorca, Ibiza and Formentera, and it was quite small.

“But what we didn’t account for was having almost 20 million tourists going through the country. That has become a wonderful new account and we didn’t expect it. We also had the same experience in Iceland.”

If there is an upside to be found 10 years on from the referendum, it is that the strain has prompted pockets of innovation. For instance, the UK experienced an estimated loss of 20,000 EU drivers.

“That actually led the UK to become one of the leading markets for driverless deliveries,” Rastogi points out. “The UK occasionally lags in some of this emerging tech, but we actually see [it] as one of the most globally mature players.”

None of this makes the past decade any less bruising. But listen to these founders and the through-line is not the disruption but rather what they did with it. They stopped waiting for a certainty that never came. Q5D diversified its capital when Europe turned cold. The Protein Ball Co went hunting for demand in places it had never thought to map. Locus watched its clients rebuild their operations deliberately, rather than patch them.

The most useful takeaway, 10 years on, has little to do with Brexit itself. It is that resilience is seldom planned. It’s built under pressure, by leaders who treat a shock as a prompt to reinvent rather than retreat. For Britain’s scaling businesses, that instinct has outlasted the uncertainty that created it and it will outlast whatever comes next.