Three lessons from Young Enterprise
As you may know, I’m a volunteer for Young Enterprise, a business and enterprise education charity for children and young adults. I did the Company programme when I was at school, in which you and other students meet once a week and run a company for a year. I was then a volunteer business advisor the following year and I’ve been doing the same during my internship at BT.
One of the most interesting things about advising a Young Enterprise company is seeing the mistakes they make and how they deal with them. Since their business education is at most a year or two of business studies or economics lessons, they’re always susceptible to making basic errors which more experienced people wouldn’t. However, this is almost the whole point of Young Enterprise. As the charity motto says, it’s all about learning by doing. Young Enterprise offers pupils a chance to make these mistakes before it really counts and in a low-risk environment. If they lose all their money, then the shares they sold are worthless, but nothing more.
As this year’s Company programme is drawing to a close, I thought I’d share three key lessons which always seem to pop up during each year of Young Enterprise.
Know how much money you have
It may seem like common sense, but knowing how much money is in the bank is an issue that every Young Enterprise company I’ve seen has had trouble with. They make decisions about how much material to buy, how many widgets to make and so on all the time, but rarely can answer the simple question, “how much money do you have?”
This often comes about because the appointed finance director doesn’t update the company’s accounts frequently enough. By the time they get round to doing so, they have a box of cash, a few scribbled notes and little else.
Have an agenda
Young Enterprise companies always use agendas towards the start of the year, but often stop writing them after a few months. Meetings become unstructured and companies end up spending more time deciding what to do in them than anything else. In one meeting this year, the company I’m advising spent half an hour discussing what to do without actually doing anything at all.
This sort of thing probably happens because pupils haven’t used agendas before and so don’t really understand why they’re valuable. Agendas initially seem like an overly formal, unneccessary burden. However, once companies see what it’s like to try and running a meeting without an agenda, they being to write them again to regain some order.
Communicate outside of meetings
Although Young Enterprise companies meet once a week, they often work between meetings. This works pretty well when all of the members go to the same school, like this year, but when they don’t see each other every day, communication can be an issue.
A common example of this is someone being tasked to research a subject or order some goods, but then having a problem with it. Often, they’ll wait until the weekly meeting to tell people about why they didn’t complete their task, but sometimes this is too late.
Perhaps these lessons seem too obvious, but I think it’s helpful to remind ourselves why we have agendas, keep track of finances and make sure we communicate well. Young Enterprise gives pupils a chance to learn these basic skills for the first time, but it’s also an oppurtunity for business advisors like me to remember why we did in the first place.
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