Young Enterprise Business Advisor 2024

Background

Young Enterprise is an established employability and financial education charity that works with young people across the UK. It runs a program challenging student teams to create and run their own company.

The Business Advisor serves as a mentor to these teams, helping them navigate the challenges of starting a business and learning to operate within a professional environment.

Approach

Colleagues from PryceWilliams were invited to join the program as Business Advisors, offering their expertise in finance and project delivery.

At the culmination of the program, the student teams competed in the regional championships, showcasing which business had been the most profitable or had made the greatest social impact whilst adhering to their mission statement.

Analysis Performed

Working with students presents challenges that mirror those faced when managing any diverse group of stakeholders. Business Advisors must remember they are guiding a team inexperienced in professional settings, let alone running a business with multiple founders.

To help students develop an effective workflow, Business Advisors offer:

• Guidance: Encouraging students to find solutions themselves by asking guiding questions, rather than simply providing answers.
• Professionalism: Demonstrating how to function in a work environment and move beyond the organized chaos of school projects.
• Takeaways: Ensuring that students understood the real-world challenges of running a company and developed new skills in the process.

The role of the Business Advisor is not to dictate how to run a company but to help students think critically about challenges and develop their own solutions. This fosters problem-solving and reinforces that they often already possess the knowledge they need.

One of the primary areas where students required support was managing meetings. Initially, meetings lacked structure, with no agenda and discussions often devolving into disorganised chatter. Business Advisors introduced a more structured approach such as agendas and defined roles. Conflict management was also addressed, with an emphasis on understanding that emotional responses are common in professional settings.

Young Enterprise aims to equip young people with essential workplace skills. The Business Advisors looked to impart their expertise to prepare the students for further education, vocational aspirations and entrepreneurship.

The program concluded with students presenting their businesses, and their successes and learnings over the program, to a panel of judges in front of an audience of over 50. The professionalism of their presentations demonstrated either the effectiveness of the Business Advisors’ support—or more likely—the impressive potential of the students themselves.

Conclusions

Through its partnership with Young Enterprise, PryceWilliams has witnessed the positive benefits that extracurricular activities can provide to young people. These activities provide students the tangible skills that will serve them well when they enter the workforce.

For Business Advisors, this experience also offered a unique challenge, requiring them to engage with a group of highly ambitious stakeholders. This interaction allowed Advisors to test their own skills and expand their capabilities further.

Recommendations

We strongly encourage anyone passionate about empowering young people to support initiatives like Young Enterprise. Whether through offering your time as a Business Advisor or contributing financially, such as sponsoring an award, there are many ways to get involved and make a lasting impact.

Get Involved

If you would like to get involved, contact Jill Tinsley at Young Enterprise here:
jill.tinsley@y-e.org.uk