Oh that's ridiculous. Same goes for Prince Edward and it didn't do him any good with his Ardent Productions business did it?

Martha Lane Fox is another.

Even Stelios - he started easyJet with a £5m loan from his dad - this remains his only really successful venture. Stelmar - his first business - remains tiny by comparison to other similar businesses, and his other easy... branded businesses aren't great.

Just because you have money behind you, or you have an ancestor who was a successful business person, doesn't mean you will make a success of what you do.

I've seen many successful family businesses go under soon after a less able (or hard working) family member takes it over.

Similarly, I always remember the bloke who gave me my start in estate agency - he was the regional director of a large chain (he later became managing director) who landed that job after his own, smaller chain was bought out by the company I went to work for. He'd made loads of money both whilst owning the business and from its sale, but he remained down to earth and was a nice guy to work with. Basically, he worked hard and made his own money, so knew the value of what he had and the people who had been with him and effectively facilitated his success.

His son, however was a stuck up so-and-so who'd never known anything other than wealth. He was a director of that chain also and wouldn't give anyone the time of day unless they were female, under 30 and had big tits. He also became managing director following his dad's retirement and I hear that he was, shall we say, encouraged to leave following a period of poor performance.

In a nutshell - Senior was a hard working, intuitive, gracious businessman, whereas all Junior knew was his silver spoon.

I didn't say that being born into a wealthy family guaranteed you success - clearly James Dyson & Richard Branson have achieved something special and in both cases have overcome many failures too. I know a couple of self-made multi-millionaires whose kids have dropped out of university with no real goals other than to enjoy their trust fund, so totally agree that wealth can have the opposite effect.

But I would still ague that their respective schools probably didn't need to run something like Young Enterprise. Couple of my wife's relatives are currently at Eton and have the belief instilled into them that they will be running things soon - they already know socially people who are company CEOs, investment bankers, MPs etc (& the Lane-Foxes as it happens). They don't need to spend time running pretend businesses.

Let us not forget though, that being very wealthy does allow for somewhat easier business start-up.
The risk may be the same in empirical numbers of £££ required but is vastly different in terms of the risk to your livelihood.

e.g. Prince Edward is still hugely rich.

Making a complete cobblers of Arbusto and CaterAir didn't do any good for George Walker Bush's future. Whatever happened to him?

Maybe not, but some people do. The same approach isn't suitable for absolutely everyone, is it?

Some of us aren't able to get jobs based on who we socialise with, so we need other options.

Absolutely. Stelios once said "The easiest way to make a few million is to have a million to start with."

I did it as part of my degree and found it to be a waste of time (primarily because I was in a group with a bunch of morons). I think the idea itself is a good one and the scheme seemed reasonably well structured given the nature of it. I think only good can come from the scheme personally.

The point of enterprise based education is not to teach people entrepreneurship (to even question whether it can be taught suggests a misunderstanding of how entrepreneurs (as opposed to business owner-managers) operate), but to promote it as a viable option and help people build practical skills and experience which will help them on their path.

My teacher was telling us the other day about someone last year who, for his Young Enterprise, enlisted his English class to work for him writing articles for newspapers which he had contacts with. He then sold his articles to the papers, undercutting most journalists. He made £20,000 that year, ended up hiring a PA to help him be organised for his final exams.

And voluntary is how these kind of things should be done. Having read your opening post in this thread I do think that you’re doing something good and I only wished that we (me and the other pupils I went to school with) did more things like this at school. The only practical business experience during my education was running a games stall to raise money for the school during the Christmas and summer fairs. What you’re doing looks like an extension of that which is great.

I never directed what I originally wrote towards you personally otherwise I would have added that this looks like another one of those poverty pimp jobs. However what I should have done is gone onto to add that what you’re doing seems genuine. Hopefully I’ve amended any confusion they may have been before. Good luck with what you’re doing!

Now let me go and expand on an enterprise scheme that isn’t genuine and just a good way for mildly successful/unsuccessful businesspeople to line their pockets by exploiting an issue that the government throws a lot of money to try and solves. I’m talking about 'rlEnterprise Leedsrl' who have engaged with 4,000 people (thats not even including the 15,500 young people they claim to have introduced enterprise to) and only created 596 jobs. Now I think it’s great that they’ve got people into jobs and we must not trivialise that fact.

However these rlpoverty Pimpsrl and others like them have all thrived by exploiting the laws of probability that if they try to ‘help’ thousands of people into enterprise then some of the people that have been helped are bound to get success. But the majority don’t get success and it’s wrong that they still get the big funding for helping the minority that they do.

What I’m trying to say that this money from the government would be better used towards creating jobs for the unemployed rather than creating more work for those who already have it. For Example Enterprise Leeds clearly has done by paying business people to deliver the enterprise schemes for the young and disadvantage. Enterprise Leeds doesn’t have the right intentions and are the very essence of poverty pimps that wouldn’t give the poor their time of day if they weren’t getting paid by the government to do it.

Hello!
Me over here in the corner
Third generation to run the business
Yep, I lost it too

I did some work with Young Enterprise in a few schools in Swindon when i was with Intel, was pretty good fun - we set up a network with laptops etc and the kids had to work together using email and stuff to simulate a real world business environment.

My uncles took over a firm that my grandfather had been running until he retired – a totally messed it up. That despite private educations and getting further money from their father to try to help out when they made a mess. One was an accountant – I never have worked out what the other did.

My mother has always rather resented that, since she she never had such monies herself and, in his will, they still all got the same.

Families, eh?

It's no wonder people nowadays build businesses up and sell them on, rather than pass them down, really, which it could be said is contributing to the dominance of corporate firms rather than small independents.

But that's for a different thread