We already knew that Bristol is a great hub for entrepreneurs, artists and generally a fab place for small businesses to grow and flourish. Bristol has been home to the beginnings of many a successful business over the years, Wallace and Gromit, Ribena and Concorde were all born in our fabulous city. But this year, Bristol and Somerset has been named as the UK’s fastest growing small and medium sized business exporters, meaning that Bristol’s entrepreneurs have had the fastest growing international sales over the past two years. Impressive.

These stats are hardly suprising when so many wonderful companies call Bristol home. Skateboard manufacturer ‘Shiner’, based in Aztec West Bristol, was ranked eighth, in the Sunday Times BT Business SME Export Track 100 league table. Basically Shiner’s sales have rocketed by £3.8m last year, and they are doing bloomin’ well.

‘Team Love’ a Bristol based event company specializing in festival production are the team behind the infamous Bristol festival ‘Loves Saves The Day’ that annually has all of Bristol dancing away a weekend at the end of May. Tom and Dave, Team Love’s directors have also been involved with projects at Glastonbury, Secret Garden Party and many, many more. This success stemmed from Bristol being the perfect city for the events to grow.

‘Workbrands’ a marketing agency based in Bristol has been named one of the UK’s fastest growing marketing companies. With an excellent 2014 under their belts, just before the end of the year Workbrands were listed in the Top 20 Fastest Growing agencies by business to business marketing resource B2B Marketing. Based in Bedminster and founded in 2003 by Nick Farrar, the company has seen a major increase in clients and projects over the last couple of years and has been able to increase their company size with new roles created for designer and marketers. Not only creating success for themselves but opening new job opportunities for the talent in Bristol, which is just great all round.

On a larger scale Hargreaves Lansdown, a stockbrokers created by Bristol based Peter Hargreaves and Steve Lansdown which started out in a spare bedroom now employ 950 people and is a FTSE 100 company. The company manages a hefty 55 billion pounds worth of stocks and shares. Hargreaves Lansdown is one of Bristol’s big success stories and continues to flourish with an office on the Harbourside. Hargeaves Lansdown is the perfect example of how a small start up business with a great business plan and idea can become so fruitful in our great city.

Jon and Tristain bought an old printworks in Stokes Croft and renovated it themselves into a pie kitchen, named it Pieminister and the rest is history. Pieminister’s goodies went down an absolute treat with us Bristolians and then they began to expand across the country, and you can even buy a Pieminister pie in Waitrose, and if that doesn’t mean you’ve made it then I don’t know what does!