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Is the Government doing enough to give young go-getters a leg up?
What do James Murray Wells of Glasses Direct; Al Gosling at Extreme Group; Rachel Lowe of Destinations board game fame and Daniel Priestley at Triumphant Events have in common... apart from being hugely successful and horribly young?
Well, when you talk to each of these twentysomethings you find that they have all harnessed unhappiness with their lot in life and a fierce desire to succeed. They also feel that their education was largely irrelevant - even if their business ideas came to them while at college or university - and it gave them none of the tools they actually needed to run a business. When they made mistakes, they made them the hard way.
This view was echoed recently by the CBI's Young Entrepreneur of the Year Adam Hildreth, who criticised Government plans for keeping children in school or training until they are 18, pointing out that many successful entrepreneurs, including Richard Branson, Alan Sugar and Philip Green all left school at 17.
Take Daniel Priestley, a 26 year old Australian, who has built up an international events business. He says he went to university for about a year before deciding he could learn more by actually building his then dance party business from scratch.
"I thought the next logical step after school would have to be to do a business degree and to learn about business," he tells me. "When I got there what I found was the people that were teaching me at that university had absolutely no business experience whatsoever."
James Murray Wells set up his online spectacles business Glasses Direct at the tender age of 21 and while studying for his degree. He thought £150 was an awful lot of money to spend on a pair of glasses - "I thought how much beer that would buy me" he recalls. Suitably incentivised he set about making his idea work.
"I didn't think I was ever going to be an entrepreneur," he says. "What I thought was if there was an idea or an opportunity that was good enough then I wouldn't hesitate in seizing it... whether I was in a career or doing a degree. Glasses Direct happened to be the right one and it hit me at that time before I got a job."
Rachel Lowe's story offers a different insight. Having left school as a teenage mum, her idea for a board game based on destination-based tasks came to her while she was working as a cab driver.
Despite being rebuffed by manufacturers like Hambro -and later, more publicly on the BBC's Dragons' Den - she actually got her idea off the ground when she saw posters for an enterprise competition during her first term at university. She won and the rest, as they say, is history.
The point of describing these stories is that they show how flexible the education system needs to be if it is to enable young people to become the entrepreneurs. The Government says its plan to keep teenagers in school or training for longer will be flexible. But you have to wonder how yet another Whitehall directed policy is going to be implemented on the ground.
The question is whether schools and universities are letting down the next generation? There's certainly much more awareness of entrepreneurship in the places where I'm asked to speak, driven by excellent work by Young Enterprise and others. But the teaching of entrepreneurship is patchy and the funding set aside by the Treasury to pay for it is not ring-fenced, tempting schools to use the money to ease shortfalls in their budgets.
But it is not all about leaving school at the age of 16 and building up your business from a market stall as Sir Alan Sugar did. As the young entrepreneurs that I've interviewed illustrate, a major benefit of going to university is to develop a network of potential co-workers for when you do hit upon that great business idea.
There are alternatives. The networking infrastructure provided by a university environment is now replicated by on-line social networks such as The Daily Networker and Ecademy. And the atmosphere at live networking events is also very reminiscent of a university campus, with some lecture-based structure (a guest speaker) and plenty of networking time at the bar.
But if I have one suggestion for our new Prime Minister, it is to spend less on new initiatives and hand-outs, and more on getting enterprise and its key skill of selling onto the National Curriculum. These are basic life skills that can successfully be taught in a day and will remain with young people for the rest of their lives.
First published in The Daily Telegraph