If you're good enough, you're old enough

What’s the ideal age to start a business? According to easyGroup founder Stelios, still only 41, it’s the late twenties. “By then you’ve got experience of working and making mistakes in someone else’s business,” he asserts.

While not actively discouraging younger entrepreneurs, Stelios believes it’s wiser to get some experience and qualifications under your belt first.

Others are more passionate advocates for experience and it’s certainly true a significant number of entrepreneurs use sector knowledge built up as an employee to go into business for themselves.

Then again, you only need to look at our Startups 100 list that’s littered with examples of entrepreneurs who started-up as teenagers to see work (or life) experience isn’t a pre-requisite for success.

The fact the over 50s and under 25s are the two fastest growing age groups for start-ups, while the average remains safely in the mid thirties, proves that actually this whole debate is rather redundant.

They say in football, ‘if you’re good enough, you’re old enough’, and perhaps that’s the case with business as well.

David Storey, dean at Warwick Business School reckons the relevancy of experience on success or failure could be even cruder. Writing it yesterday’s FT, he says: “Novices are neither more likely nor less likely to have a business that either grows or survives than experienced founders.”

Assuming experience isn’t a pre-requisite for starting a business, it’s imperative the current focus on promoting enterprise in schools doesn’t just continue, it should be extended.

The goal doesn’t even need to create more businesses (although this will hopefully become a by-product), it should be to breed enterprising thinking, a thirst for innovation and a belief that businesses contribute positively to society.

At the launch of last night’s National Social Enterprise Awards, Liam Black, a social enterprise ambassador and until recently director at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Foundation, revealed he’s spent the last two months exploring the UK’s teenage gang culture.

Having consulted young offenders, support workers, parents, churches, police and schools, the one solution that kept coming back was the need for ‘meaningful work; jobs with a purpose’, so young people felt there was a value beyond McJob to staying out of trouble.

Liam thinks it’s our moral responsibility to shape business towards social good in order to meet these aims – and I agree.

The youth of today wants better than McJob and who can blame them? So let’s make sure we’re feeding their hunger for enterprise – be it social, entrepreneurial or other.

Just to prove (hopefully not labour) the point, 200 students met in London this week for the launch of enterprise networking initiative SKILL!. No it wasn’t another government support scheme, it’s a private company run by a guy called Patrick Philpott. I say, guy, he’s still doing his A Levels and started his previous business at 15…