COVER STORY
Since Jerry Kennelly famously sold Stockbyte
and Stockdisc to Getty Images for €135m in 2006, one of the things that struck himas he’s told his story to various audiences since was the huge disconnect that existed between education and the real world he lived in when he started out. “There aren’t too many ordinary guys with no Leaving Cert
with somuch success. I left school at the end of fifth year,which worked forme,but it’s probably not as easy to operate with that abandon today. People need fall-back positions,” he says. “A third-level education gives you a broader view of life, but
it’s not the ‘be-all-and-end-all’. One of its downsides is when people are older coming into the workplace they’ve less energy. An advantage I had was that I made a lot of the mistakes peo- ple generally make when they’re older when I was young. I got them out of the way.” Describing himself as “unemployable anyway”,Kennelly says
he always knew it was likely he’d work for himself.Having been involved in the family business, a press agency, from when he was “tall enough to stand”he started a newspaper at the age of 14 with his brothers. He still feels there is a lost connection in education with
entrepreneurship in Ireland. “Young people tend to be focused on professional careers and getting salaried jobs. I felt there was a need to show young people that it’s possible to exercise control over their own lives through the power of creation.”
SAYING ‘YES’ TO ‘YEP’
After winning the Ernst&Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year title in 2005,Kennelly got to know a number of the other entrepreneurs involved in the programme. “The Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur circle at the
time was made up of interesting and exciting people who had created their own path.Yet the people who really needed to see that weren’t getting the chance.The likes of PadraigO’Ceidigh and Denis O’Brien had great energy and I thought we could achieve something by sharing our experience,” he says. This conviction led to Kennelly spearheading the Young
Entrepreneur Programme, a not-for-profit organisation started in 2007 that’s dedicated to illustrating the validity of entrepreneurship as a career choice.The six-month programme complements traditional learning by layering workshops, case studies and interaction with key business leaders on top of par- ticipants’ own ideas. The list of mentors on the programme reads like a ‘who’s
who’ of Irish entrepreneurs – Aidan Heavey of Tullow Oil; Bobby Kerr of Insomnia; the founders of
Daft.ie, Brian and Eamonn Fallon; and John and Francis Brennan, owners of the five-star ParkHotelKenmare and presenters of the RTÉ series ‘At Your Service’.The list goes on. “Over the past three years, 1,600 students have graduated
from the Young Entrepreneur Programme and this number is set to increase to over 1,900 by 2013.The ‘YEP’generation will be better prepared for the freedom and joy of entrepre- neurship than any of those who have come before them,” says Kennelly. “They are very much changed people at the end of it; those
lessons will never leave them. It’s not just about building con- fidence in their potential to be entrepreneurs; they also learn how to create and execute a business plan, which they have to do to the highest standards, and also take criticism on board. Some of the business plans are stunning.” For example, the winner of the secondary-school Young
Entrepreneur 2010 title wasMichael Dillane, from CBS in Tralee, whose business plan was for a school gifts website.
Schoolgiftsforgrads.com offers Leaving Cert students a wide range of gifts in varying price, quality and style. Dillane is already running the business from his home. Third-level winner Lisa O’Donoghue’s idea was to recycle
LCDs. Currently no device exists in the market to address the millions of LCD screens that are scrapped, but the University of Limerick research fellow’s design allows LCD monitors to be safely disposed of into valuable computer waste. Eighteen finalists with business plans ranging from reptile
breeding, designer rowing gloves and solar-powered bag lights to an electronic medical receipts card, easily detachable horse riding spurs and a DVD study aid for scientific experiments put their ideas to the final test in front of a judging panel at the Malton Hotel last April.
LEARNING ABOUT BUSINESS MODELS
Another important aspect of the programme is how to look at business models. “We look at how to run a sanity test, where the fixed costs are, how many units the students need to sell in a day ormonth.You need to look at your costs on one page and decide if it’s something that’s going to work,” Kennelly explains. His own early experience running his freelance photogra-
phy business, which he set up in 1981, influenced the deci- sion to incorporate such lessons into the curriculum. “I didn’t know what I didn’t know back then. I was instinc-
tively focused on doing a good job and serving customers, but I didn’t have much financial knowledge.This would have been a threat to my business if things hadn’t been so lax,” he says. “I didn’t have huge concerns about money or the ability to
understand cash flow and there was no element of financial planning. I was left at the mercy of the banks, paying 22pc interest on an overdraft, which wasn’t the cleverest of things. I managed to survive that and learned a lot of the core things I needed to about cash flow.”
18 OWNER MANAGER VOL 3 ISSUE 3 2010
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