My name is Ollie Forsyth. I am 19 years old and I’m the founder of The Budding Entrepreneur. I left school aged 16 without qualifications; I was bullied terribly and, frankly, I couldn’t wait to leave. I am also dyslexic, so exams were never my forte.
I’ve always had the entrepreneurial bug. I started making pocket money when I was six – I used to make my parents tea and coffee in the morning and charged them 20p a cup, and if they wanted it reheated that would be another 20p! Later I managed the school tuck shop. On the coca cola can it would say ‘do not sell separately’, so I sold two together… that way I was not selling them separately.
And I started my first proper business aged 13 – Ollie’s Shop, an online gift shop for teenagers. The company grew up to 150% every single year. I was making up to £10k a year right at the beginning and it has grown ever since.
After being cited in a number of media publications a lot of young people started to ask me: ‘’how do I start a business?’’ So, at the age of 16, I launched my own entrepreneurs magazine which grew to 50,000 in the first year.
I managed to meet a number of interesting entrepreneurs through this. But having run the magazine for 18 months, we needed to commercialise it. So, at the age of 18, I launched The Budding Entrepreneur Club, the best entrepreneurs community for entrepreneurs starting up and scaling their enterprises. We have been growing 36% every month and are launching in four new cities this year which will be exciting to see.
At the Every Child Included conference, I want to focus on providing young people with the best opportunities – what changes can we effect so that schools inspire students to make the most of it? And how can we give students the best possible jobs if they choose not to go to university? In the face of such increasingly off-putting tuition fees, more and more young people are seeking non-academic routes to their careers. So, I want to talk about how we are going to support the next generation of budding entrepreneurs and those who have amazing talents. But also on the corporate side, how can big corporates inspire their employees to feel inspired coming to work?
Bullying in schools is another point, which is happening in some schools to a very high level. This should not be happening. Having been very badly bullied myself, it is not a very nice thing to be going through and schools are not tackling this area enough. Students, from what I have seen, are frightened to go and talk to the school about being bullied; they are afraid those bullies will find out and make the victim’s life even harder. This should not be happening in any school. So, I will be talking about ideas on how we could potentially stop this.
The main subject I will be focusing on is entrepreneurship in schools. Educating students about enterprise, financial education and politics is vital. Even teaching them about life skills- how to fix a tyre on a car, how to cook for yourself, how to file your own tax return- all these basic life skills are not being taught in schools which is disappointing. More and more young people are wanting to start their own business but if the school or university is not educating students in ‘real business,’ studies, they are not going to achieve their goals.