This week is a little bit different because we’re going to talk about the fact that age is just a number.
And, if you are somebody who’s sitting out there watching this and for some reason, you’re letting self doubt creep in and you think that your age is stopping you from being able to achieve what you think you can achieve, then hopefully this video is just for you.
I’ve got some personal experiences to share, some things that I’ve learned from being in the Den and hopefully you’ll take a lot away from it!
First of all, I want to chat about somebody who came into the Den in the last series. So, I don’t know if you remember but I had an amazing lady called Carla come into the Den with her business, Good Wash Day.
So Carla came into the Den and she said she was in her 50s, she’d had this idea for a product and she really wanted to start and launch the business but she was worried that she was too old and didn’t know what she didn’t know so she took herself off to business school.
She learned about business, equipped herself with the knowledge she felt like she needed, and then she started the business. And in that moment, I was so blown away by her tenacity, her drive, the fact that she knew she was onto something so good, she couldn’t just let it go to waste. That was what attracted me to want to invest in Carla.
The business was great as well but in that moment in the Den, I invested in her as an individual.
So for all of you who are out there who are watching this and you may be worried that you are a little bit too old to start a business, just think about Carla. Go and look up her story, read a little bit more about it, and hopefully that will inspire you to realise that age really is just a number.
Now, this also works the other way around.
I meet a lot of people who are worried that they are too young or too inexperienced to start a business so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about me and how I got started. I knew from a very young age that I wanted to run my own business even though I didn’t know what that business was going to be in, but I’d grown up in an entrepreneurial family and I knew that I wanted to follow in my parents’ footsteps and start my own business.
I actually didn’t have the confidence to start my own business at first and I didn’t know if I’d have an idea so instead, I was planning on going to work for the family business and taking over what my mam and dad had already built.
So, I went off to university to study management so that I would learn the skills and the knowledge that I needed to successfully run that business. But, while I was there, I did a university degree placement. I did one of those years in industry that you go and work and I went to work for a tiny little craft company in an industry I’d never heard of, I’d never been exposed to, had no experience in, but I fell in love with the industry and I had these ideas and aspirations to start a business within the industry.
Now, I was only 21. I didn’t have any knowledge and experience of craft and my only experience and knowledge of running a business was what I picked up from my parents’ when I was younger but I didn’t let that stop me.
That’s what you’ve got to remember, at no moment did I doubt myself I think this wasn’t going to work.
Actually, it was a brilliant time to start a business because I had no dependents and I had no mortgage to pay. If everything didn’t work out, I’d just move back in with my mam and dad and I’d go on the path that I was planning to in the first place, which was to join the family business.
So for a lot of people, a lot of kids especially, when they say to me, I wanna start my own business but I’m a bit too young to do it, I say rubbish to that.
There is never a better time to start a business than if you’re a young person because you don’t have all of the responsibilities. You don’t have to give things up to be able to put your time into the business like you have to when you are older perhaps. So I would really challenge you to think about that.
And sometimes I need to take a dose of my own medicine!
When I was in my early thirties, it’s when I had the opportunity to go and do Dragons’ Den. Now, for those of you that haven’t heard the story before, I had a friend round, my great friend Raman was round one day and we got talking and I said how much I love Dragons’ Den and he said ‘oh I think you’d be a brilliant dragon’ and I said ‘yeah I think I’d be a brilliant dragon too but I won’t be able to go on Dragons Den’ and when he said well well why wouldn’t you I said ‘well I’m far too young I’m way younger than all of the other dragons’ and he said ‘well that’s ridiculous age is just a number’.
And I talked about how it’s not just a number and said that the reason I respect those dragons and they know so much stuff is because they’ve been around a long time. They’ve been in business a long time. And he said something to me that really stuck with me. He said ‘yes, but you started your business earlier. You started your business when you were 21 so you’ve still had over 10 years of experience in business’.
And, when I’d looked into it and the previous dragons who’d gone before me, a lot of them had started their businesses when they were older so they probably had the same amount of business experience as me, they just hadn’t started their business as early as I had.
When he reframed my thinking like that, it really made me think differently. So I thought, yes, okay, I am good enough, which is what led me to go through the application process to Dragons’ Den, where it was the producers and the people at the BBC who were working out if they thought I had enough experience and knowledge to be a successful dragon.
I went on to become the youngest dragon to be on Dragons’ Den, so it just shows you that age is just a number and the only thing that is a problem with your age is if you let it hold you back.