Car washing and language teaching return profits for would be entrepreneurs

What would you do if you were given £20 and told to start up a business? How would you do it and could you make a profit?

Members of a project at Wellington College did, with money-making ideas ranging from teaching Mandarin and French to car washing and making crochet hair accessories.

The seven students were given £20 to set up their enterprise and spent six days over the course of the last year meeting businesspeople and discussing topics like how to write a business plan, generate sales and manage your cash flow.

At the end of the year, after some negotiation between the students and course leaders, it was agreed the students would give back 11% of their profits, with that money going towards funding the programme in its next year.

The Future Founders project was created by Wellington College’s Head of Business Simon Roundell and  founder of drinks company Thomson & Scott Amanda Thomson.

It worked with four students from the college alongside pupils from Tomlinscote, The Piggott, The Holt, Bohunt, Blessed Hugh Faringdon and Winston Churchill schools.

Elsie, from Winston Churchill School, said: “I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the Wellington Future Founders Programme. It helped me build confidence and become more comfortable speaking with new people. Through WFF, I met others who shared similar ambitions and the environment allowed me to develop personally as well as professionally.”

Amanda Thomson said: “The results were frankly extraordinary. Our ground-breaking model shows that with the right encouragement and backing, a real-life understanding of business through actual doing is thoroughly inspiring for 13 to 14 year olds.

“We watch them grow and start to understand profit and purpose very quickly across the year, and importantly, the hard graft needed to build something, learning through failure and just how rewarding the journey can be. Whether these students decide to embark on their own businesses or not, the skills they acquire will be brilliant training for their wider life both in school and beyond.”

The external pupils were selected to take part in the project by the Wellington College Learning Alliance, which collaborates with state schools to create extra opportunities for their students.

For a student’s perspective see this report from Constance from The Holt School.