Dragon’s Den’s Theo Paphitis on supporting young people to get into enterprise

Covid is breeding more #entrepreneurs than ever before 

Each week Sharon Davies, CEO of Young Enterprise, will be having conversations with teachers, young professionals, entrepreneurs as well as charity and business leaders in the new podcast series “Enterprising Mindsets”, exploring different people’s perspective on an enterprising mindset, it’s contribution to their journey and their view on its role in building futures.

This week Dragon’s Den star Theo Paphitis, talks about what it means to be an entrepreneur, the importance of talking about failure and what an enterprising mindset means to him.

Theo discussed why problem-solving, resourcefulness and passion are key elements of entrepreneurship, and why there is no one type of entrepreneur, but they all have passion and hard work at the heart of their success:

“[The] current climate will now breed, in my opinion, more entrepreneurs than ever before because, to go back to how we started this conversation, there’ll be a requirement. There’ll be a requirement for people to go out there and do their own thing. More and more people will actually be thinking and executing their dreams of running their own business, working for themselves.”

“Children are never ever too young to learn by enterprise, because enterprise is a life skill. The ability to communicate. The ability to present. The ability to understand. These are all things that you need in your life.” 

“There’s just one key rule that you’ve got to understand when you go into business or want to become an entrepreneur. You are going to fail at some stage on something. The key rule is never ever bet the farm. In other words, don’t go all in. Learn from your failures but just make sure your failures don’t kill you off.” 

“If you look at where people have made their money, entrepreneurs have made their money, it’s rarely on the first venture. It’s often second, third, and sometimes fourth or fifth venture. It doesn’t have to go right first time. You can keep out there and learning from what you did before, to make the second time better.” 

“There are a lot of new challenges now. Because the world is changing, consumer habits are changing, the way we lead our lives is changing. As I said earlier, it’s a very exciting time to be an entrepreneur, even for someone starting to be an entrepreneur.”

Young Enterprise is a national charity that has helped over four million school aged children access key enterprise, employability and financial education skills.