In Peter Jones’s brave new world, six-year-olds will learn business
techniques, teenagers will be taught to become tycoons and a generation of
Brits will grow up saying “I can” rather than “Can I?”
Last week the telecoms multimillionaire announced that he is using several
million pounds of his fortune to set up an academy where 16 to 19-year-olds
will be shown how to launch their very own company – just as Jones himself
did, when, at 16, he founded a tennis coaching school.
Once the national enterprise academy near London is up and running – it opens
its doors to its first batch of students next year – a second centre will
open near Manchester and then satellites are due to be rolled out across the
country. Jones, star of the business reality TV show Dragons’ Den, hopes
some of the business lessons will even be taught in primary schools.
Stretching out behind his desk in the Mayfair office of one of his companies,
Jones reveals that the “Tycoons academy”, as he calls it, is a long-held
ambition. “I put a team onto it a few months ago – now government has come
in too, but I was going to do it anyway.”
Ever the competitor, he has in his sights nothing less than an overhaul of
timid British attitudes to risk-taking. He wants to make Britain rather than
America “the best place in the world” to set up a business.
His aim isn’t just helping teenagers to launch UK companies – but ones that
can go global: “not just opening a shop on the corner but opening shops in
every country in the world”.
And even though his new academy is being backed by government to the tune of
£3m, Jones does not hide his belief that a lot of today’s state schooling is
pretty irrelevant. “It hasn’t changed for 30 years,” as he puts it.
“One of my favourite subjects was maths,” he says. “I was good with numbers
but I had to teach myself after I left how to evaluate cash flow or
understand a sales ledger. You should walk out of school and know that stuff
. . . In geography why don’t they teach about countries’ GDP, or what makes
their economies successful?
“I find it strange that we have lessons that do not correlate to industry. We
need to think more about what we are teaching and why.”
The man who decided not to go to university – figuring that a degree wouldn’t
close the gap fast enough on his ambition of making serious money – was just
as forthright when he was summoned to see Gordon Brown last year.
Jones, a father of five, told the prime minister that if entrepreneur-ship is
to thrive in the next generation “there needs to be a cultural mindset
shift. To do that we have to take the boardroom back into the classroom”.
“In the schools that I visit,” he says, “many children want to be
entrepre-neurial but their attitude is ‘Can I?’ Across the water it’s ‘I
can’. It comes back to confidence. The American culture is go-get but the
same culture is not inbred here at a young age. I would like to see children
as young as six or seven learning about business.”
Natalia, the third of his five children, is only six, but already, says her
father, she has the right mindset. “She watches Dragons’ Den and tells me,
‘Daddy, you were wrong about that. That idea was good. I think it will
sell’. She’s fantastic at maths, and very competitive.”
Just like her father, then. In his book, Tycoon, Jones writes about bunking
off his private school, aged seven, to sit in his father’s leather swivel
office chair to daydream about being a hot-shot boss. His first really
successful business, a computer company, made him a millionaire in his
twenties. However, he lost everything – including his first marriage and his
house – when clients went bust.
Dusting himself down, after a brief stint working for a mobile phone company,
he set up Phones International, and had built up a £200m business empire by
the age of 35. Now his portfolio includes companies in media, telecoms,
recruitment and publishing.
“In America there’s much less stigma attached to business going wrong,” he
says. “People see it as valuable experience: second time round you are very
backable over there.” But not, it seems, over here.
Jones says that in the 48 hours since he announced the academy, the phone has
been ringing constantly. Already a waiting list of wannabe entrepreneurs is
being drawn up. “We have had to set up an e-mail hotline,” he says, “and
have three times more names” than the initial 230 places.
So how will the numbers be whittled down? Will teenagers have to pitch for a
place in the way that contestants seeking investment present their business
ideas on Dragons’ Den – judged perhaps by a panel of moguls rather than
dragons? After all, Jones wants his glitzy tycoon friends – such as Sir
Philip Green, Gordon Ramsay and Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou – to give lectures
at the academy to inspire the pupils.
“Maybe,” he says, smiling at the prospect of choosing kids based on how well
they pitch. With government backers on the steering committee, though, and a
commitment to take a quarter of children from poor families, selection is
likely to be a rather more bureaucratic exercise.
Television shows such as Dragons’ Den, The Apprentice and Tycoon have already
helped to make the world of business seem glamorous, countering previous
teen preferences for careers in sport, fashion or pop music.
“Teenagers’ view of success used to be whether they were going to be Robbie
Williams or David Beckham,” says Jones. But a recent government survey,
which showed that becoming an entrepreneur was “the No 1 choice for
teenagers”, suggests that aspirations are starting to shift. Yet while 1.6m
told the survey this was their top career choice, “only 70,000 actually
became entrepreneurs”.
There’s another chasm in Britain, too – between the number of businesses
setting up and those failing. Isn’t he worried about teenagers starting
companies with a recession looming?
Not at all. In fact he’s gung ho. “There are always businesses that are
recession proof,” he says, “and anyway I don’t think we will enter recession
in this country – we’ll have a slowdown and a flattening out, then come out
the other end quite quickly.”
Jones expects quite a few technology-based ideas from his students and is
convinced some could be as successful as the triumphs he has already backed
on Dragons’ Den, which a few months ago announced its first official
millionaire.
Perhaps inevitably he was a contestant with an idea that Jones had supported:
Imran Hakim and the iTeddy – a teddy bear with a media player in its tummy.
Even though Dragon Duncan Ballantyne rubbished the iTeddy, saying the idea
of joining technology and teddies “really depressed him”, Jones invested
half the £140,000 Hakim was asking for – with another Dragon, Theo Paphitis,
coming up with the rest – and the move has paid off handsomely.
“It’s now the second-most successful toy in the country,” says Jones.
Certainly Dragons’ Den is prime viewing for my 16-year-old, who dreams of
having his own business. As I walk out of Jones’s sleek office I remember
our trouble with my son’s shortlived lunchtime business selling drinks to
schoolmates. The playground entrepreneur was soon closed down. I wonder
whether in Jones’s academy his zeal would have been encouraged. Perhaps it
would already have led to a few hundred in the bank.
For more information, send an e-mail to enquiries@pj.tv
Yes, Mr Jones we really need U.S, culture. Multi-million dollar salaries for unaccountable executives who loose their shareholders money and banks who rip off their customers twice; once in charges and secondly when being bailed out by them as taxpayers.
Can do means can borrow. Was true in the U.S. but not here. Now not true now in either country due to U.S. entrepreneurs. Then there is the difference between British and U.S. venture capitalists? Will you tell them or let the "can do" kids find out for themselves and know where to go if they ever recover from the experience.
Without the tosh it would be a much more attractive proposition. Teach them how to do it in Britain not in the U.S. It will always be harder here and they need to know that and how to deal with the difference.
Chris Everett, Epsom, UK
There’s another chasm in Britain, too...indeed. If you live in the distant rural nowhere you do not have the chance of getting to the academy, let alone entering.
JANE FLEMING, Whittlesey, CAMBRIDGESHIRE