Why Lord Young is ‘The Dude’
By Michael Hayman
“I’m unemployed.” So says The Dude to the young cop in the Coen brothers classic The Big Lebowski.
Well man, there’s a new Dude in town and this one’s got employment and entrepreneurs very much on his mind.
Lord Young is not Lord Dude; it’s plain and simple, he is The Dude. It’s no mere adjective. That’s what they call him in Downing Street and I’d argue its how us entrepreneurs have come to know him too.
I think his movie namesake would approve. Upon being asked about his name he says, “I’m the Dude, so that’s what you call me. Or maybe His Dudeness, or Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.”
Brevity is a common bond. For The Downing Street Dude is in a hurry. In 2012 Lord Young issued a call out to Britain to help aspirant young entrepreneurs by putting expressions of interest together to help administer the new Start Up Loans fund to under 30s across England.
Entrepreneur Country is one particular organisation that is championing this initiative. What’s more, accessing a Start-Up Loan through Entrepreneur Country provides you with all the benefits of their extensive community too, such as attendance to their regular events and access to a mentor and resources to develop your business idea.
If you’ve got a good idea, this fund could back you. Loans are approved
54 entrepreneurcountry
relevant to the business case and while the average tends to be around £2,500 to £3,000, larger loans have been approved where appropriate.
We’ve all become accustomed to the idea of Student Loans. But what if you want to get going with your new business idea instead? Now you have a lot more choice in answering that question.
I spent a lot of time putting money together to launch the business I co- founded. In the event, we needed £5,000 to get it going, a fraction of what we thought we required. Don’t get me wrong, having a reserve is a great thing, but if you want to go for it the barriers to entry for the vast majority of us are a great deal less than we might think.
“Your Country Needs You” was the call to action of another ennobled Dude of his time, Lord Kitchener. Then it was a message to march to war. Today that message is about the urgent need for more of us to march into business.
Lord Young once said “The UK is the most entrepreneurial nation in Europe but it still lags behind the US. If we had the same rate of entrepreneurship in the UK, we would have 900,000 more firms than we currently have.”
We have an ambition gap in Britain and we need to close it. Enterprise UK research showed that 50 per cent of people in Britain dream of starting a business, but only 5.8 per cent actually go for it. The challenge is to turn dreamers into doers.
Doing is crucial. Productivity growth has averaged an annual -0.8 per cent since the recession began, two to three per cent less than the norm after
previous recessions, Capital Economics calculates.
But where does the fight back start? In the book ‘The Tipping Point’, Malcolm Gladwell makes the compelling case that in the right conditions relatively small changes can make massive differences.
Central to this is what he calls “The Law of the Few,” that, “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”
Britain’s few are its stock of entrepreneurs. We need them to become the many, as they are a vital part of Britain’s fight back prospects if
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60