Yesterday was the first day of Global Entreprenurship Week - a global initiative to promote entrepreneurship.
We’re involved in a couple of ways.
Firstly I’m a Young Ambassador (emphasis on the “young” please!) for Enterprise UK, the government-funded agency at the center of it all.
Secondly, we’ve donated £200k of accounting software to them to provide to startup businesses around the UK.
The launch event took place yesterday at the British Library with a conference on entrepreneurship. Yes, it sounds awfully dull but actually it was a very interesting morning with a great line up of speakers.
There was one point made that really grabbed my attention. There was a lot of talk about what government can do to encourage startups. There were some valid suggestions such as lowering tax for startups and payroll costs for your first few staff.
Peter Jones of Dragons’ Den fame got slightly irritated and asked what government has to do with it. The point he was making is that if you’re going to start a business, you’re going to start a business. With or without help from the government. People need to take responsibility for their own lives and not depend on the government. His comments received spontaneous applause from everyone in the audience, myself included.
You do have to take control of your own life and make things happen – no one, least of all the government – is going to do it for you.
David Wei, CEO of Alibaba.com also spoke at the event. He attributes a lot of the entrepreneurial activity coming out of China to the lack of a “safety net”. By which I’m assuming he means the welfare system we have here in the UK. So in China if you have no way of making a living you either embark on entrepreneurial activity of some sort, or you starve. Simple as that.
I didn’t miss the irony of the fact that these comments were coming from an event organised by a government funded group.
So does the government have any part to play in encouraging startups? Do they cause more problems than they solve by putting in place a safety net?
I’m not advocating that we should entirely scrap the welfare system in the UK in favour of the harsh reality of life in China. But it’s certainly food for thought.
![[Post to Twitter]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Delicious]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-delicious-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Digg]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-digg-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to StumbleUpon]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-su-micro3.png){kind=icon}
Tags: Dragons, GEW, Global Entreprenurship Week, Peter Jones, startups
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Ramblings, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Great points and food for thought Duane.
Comes back to your post a couple of months (I think) about the interviewee for whom working made their parents benefits drop so they decided not to work.
Having a safety net is important, but it should be a net not something that prevents people from working hard – whether for themselves or form someone else.
It’s a good point and to be honest, from where I sit (e.g not in the UK), it isn’t too bad to embark on a startup – or be self employed in the UK.
Theres plenty of support – free(ish) healthcare (although I admit it’s not the best, perhaps) – and lets not get into the benefits system because thats a different kettle of fish altogether.
It’s also very difficult for governments to offer much financial assistance to startups – for reasons which should be quite apparent.
Based on my experience when I used to live over there, though, I’d say that Business Link could do with being drastically revamped to turn it into the beginnings of a real support service offering advice and the like..!
I think Peter Jones is right Duane, there is too much emphasis on “Government Help” …businesses need to stand on their own feet.
However, there is one important thing that Governments can do and that is tackle the obstacles that they themselves put in the way of people starting and growing businesses. Unbelievable regulation, rules, requirements and the like. It is this that holds businesses down and causes no end of work, none of which adds any value to the enterprise. The regulation is often outrageous.
It’s about time we stopped all being mothered and got on with it. Present day society is getting too used to being “looked after” to the extent that we simply cannot and will not look out for ourselves anymore!
Early morning rant over!! :-)
40 years of socialism has sucked the life out of the British entrepreneur.
Way too many people are happy to spend their entire lives in unstimulating jobs and go home at night to a couple of cheap beers, a 42 inch plasma screen and 2 weeks in Spain.
It’s like eating vanilla ice cream every day.
Don’t get me started!
Garry: What obstacles? What regulations? Lots of “red tape” you read about in the press is urban myth perpetuated by companies whose business it is to advise companies on regulations. Companies like National Britannia (Health and Safety compliance), Peninsula (employment law compliance), etc. It serves their interests for people to think that there are lots of burdensome regulations they need to comply with, so more people use their services. So they push out press releases with nonsense figures like the average small business spends five hundred hours a day completing red tape paperwork, and the newspapers lap it up.
In the UK, we have it easy. Incorporating a company is trivially cheap and easy (I once incorporated in Denmark, where minimum capital required to register a company was 50k Euro!). Assuming you are smart enough to actually keep management accounts, then year-end filing requirements are trivial. In France, for example, you have to file accounts according to a statutory set of line items. Don’t have a line for “customer discounts”? You’d better go back and find that number, then, because it has to be in your French stat accounts.
See my old 0800handyman blog for more on this:
http://blog.0800handyman.co.uk/search/label/red%20tape
Bruce Greig
And another thing. At least we don’t have a tax system like the Norwegians do:
http://www.cloudave.com/link/the-entrepreneurial-tax-that-kills-business
(Norwegian entrepreneur hit with 1% tax on value of his shares. Just for owning them.)
Goverment backing off – what twaddle!! If government didn’t intervene we would be under the control of massive conglomrates. The fact theat the Competition Commission exists is proof enough that government is crucial in PROTECTING small businesses. Without regulation and interventions we would be swiftly bought out my global corporations who pay no tax and then we’d all be stuffed.
Go to a country such as Mexico where there is no welfare, and you’ll see 80 year old women struggling to sell dried fish to people on local buses. The welfare system is what makes our country a fantastic place to live and the envy of the world. It makes me very frustrated that people could criticise such a vital tool. I think if there was no welfare people would be even less entrepreneurial because there would be more risk.
Pete Bowen – do you think we’ve been living under socialism for 40 years?
Also the government (NHS, Education etc.) is the countries largest employer, and certain people want to shrink the size of it. What will this do to unemployment?…
[...] the Global Entrepreneurship Week launch event last Monday I went along to the IoD for the final of The Pitch. Think Dragons Den without the TV [...]