Sir Richard offers advice to help entrepreneurs

An English business magnate is suggesting that Caribbean governments like Barbados would do well to invest in mentorship programmes to help propel the entrepreneurial class.

Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, made the comments as he spoke during the Virgin Atlantic “Business is an Adventure” Leadership Conference, held yesterday morning at the Hilton Barbados.

Sir Richard informed the audience, which included more than 500 business persons as well as Minister of Industry, International Business, Commerce and Small Business Development, Donville Inniss; Minister of Tourism and International Transport Richard Sealy and Leader of the Opposition, Mia Mottley, that together with former British Prime Minister David Cameron, he introduced a similar initiative in the United Kingdom – the Virgin Start Up Loans Programme – and he is adamant that it is a model that Barbados could also explore.

“There was no funding at all when I started, so we went to David Cameron and said, ‘why are you only giving loans to people who went to universities, you should be considering giving loans to people who want to start business and if you do, we will find mentors, we will help hold those people’s hands’; and I think one of the best things he did as Prime Minister was thumbs up that,” he said.

He added, “We’ve got two and a half thousand people who were mentoring under the Virgin Start Up Loans Programme in the UK, and they got loans sometimes part from us, part from the Government, and they will be the virgins of the future… We are doing something similar in the British Virgin Islands… and we would love to see that rolled out throughout the Caribbean.”

Sir Richard, himself an entrepreneur and recognised for such in 2000 with a knighthood for services to entrepreneurship, suggested that such initiatives would perhaps encourage more entrepreneurs in the region to get set up.

His comments came as he also contended that those who try and fail at starting a business should not allow the failure to daunt them, but to use it as the impetus to try again. Moreover, he maintained that society should not brand those persons as failures, as there are risks involved in business creation.

“It is important that people realise that nine out of 10 new businesses are going to fail, but those people who tried, those nine out of 10, should be celebrated because they would have learnt an enormous amount by actually getting out there and trying to build a business. And that would be the best education they ever could have had and the likelihood is, as long as they are not branded as failures, that they would be able to balance back and they would be that much stronger the next time – maybe the third time around – to create a successful business,” he said.

Sir Richard added that if failure is then followed by success, to keep a clean record and reputation it would be wise to use the profits from successful business to pay any outstanding creditors from the first failed venture.
(JRT)