This weekend I went back to where I grew up to join the family business in celebrating their latest achievement. My parents and brother run a garden centre and this weekend they opened their new retail shop, an impressive 1200 square metres of barn-style building complete with underfloor heating and impressive ranges of giftware, clothing and garden furniture.
New research from the Careers Advice Service sheds some light on the career aspirations of kids.
Apparently, girls want to be teachers when they grow up and boys want to be footballers - this will come as a surprise to no-one who has had to spend a rainy, mud-soaked afternoon kicking a half-deflated football around with an over-excited toddler.
It is, however, good to see that kids are almost as likely to want to emulate Richard Branson and Peter Jones as they are the likes of David Beckham and Ronaldo. Entrepreneur was the second most popular dream job for boys and the fifth most popular dream job for girls.
At Make Your Mark Towers, we like to think of ourselves as collection of youthful, sprightly folk. Accordingly - consistent with a tradition that has been passed down from one generation of young people to another – we can occasionally be heard grumbling about the parents. Personality defects? We blame the parents; sloppy habits? We blame the parents.
Enough.
Our ongoing Parents campaign should put to rest such ungrateful, ill-founded grumbles.
The feedback we have recieved from entrepreneurs who have engaged with the campaign – on Twitter, on the forum, and on this very blog – has highlighted just how big a source of support parents have been for those taking their first, tentative, entrepreneurial steps.
Everyone is talking about the very emotive words of wisdom from the parents of Make Your Mark Ambassadors. So for one of those my parents used to say moments
“A negative can nearly always be turned into a positive and if mistakes are made occasionally the golden rule is to learn from them and move on.”
For a bit more encouragement and heartfelt words of advice check out www.makeyourmark.org.uk/parents
We all know our TV entrepreneurs, so it has been great looking a lot closer to home, where we have been speaking to super parents of the fabulous Make Your Mark Ambassadors. There are lots of juicy insights and the nice bits entrepreneurs wouldn’t tell you about themselves(First ventures in the playground and the lows they would prefer to forget about!!)
Parents have shared their story of supporting their children on their entrepreneurial journey and they have given us some fantastic words of advice to help support other parents who have children wanting to take the enterprise route to success.
With so many young people collecting results for exams almost half of young people turn to their parents first for advice and guidance on career routes and educational next step.
Directgov revealed some very interesting research last week about parents worrying about giving their children the right advice. With more than one in four parents not being fully aware of the options and services available to theirchild the numbers are quite high in response to their findings, Directgov have launched a new online resource called What’s Next a joint initiative between Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Business Skills and Innovation and Department of Children, Schools and Families.
Well amongst other very exciting topics I have hand picked one especially for YOU!!!!
How important are your parents in supporting your entrepreneurial journey?
Share your answers in the Make Your Mark Forum.
It’s Friday and the weather is getting much cooler outside, but enough about the that…….
I came across this article suggesting that modern parents are doing a better job than in previous generations. I would just like to say that we all had very different backgrounds growing up but generally the message was the same, you had to do well at school, go to college and then get a degree. I have to say that now modern parents allow their children to find their own paths to success and to grow into well rounded young adults with so many opportunities for young people you’d be crazy to expect everyone to follow the same paths.
This week the topic of discussion at Make Your Mark has been the family. On wednesday Make Your Mark Ambassador Fleur Emery who set up successful organic porridge business Team Grasshopperwith her sister Abi came down to Make Your Mark HQ to give us the low down on working with the family in our lunch time webchat!!
It was great and more importantly identified parents as the most influential people when starting up a business. Over the last month Ambassadors have put us in touch with their parents so we can get behind the scenes gossip of what it takes to be an entrepreneur!! Parents have given us the insiders version of what it’s really been like setting up a business, the highs and the lows.
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