One of the highlights of last year was when the Entrepreneurs in Action group, the EiA, came into school to hold a day-long workshop to give us a flavour of the world of entrepreneurship. The misconceptions I had about being an entrepreneur were completely wiped away!

Why I Was Skeptical About Being An Entrepreneur

The main obstacle to being an entrepreneur, in my opinion, was that you needed an award-winning idea to start. This is not true.

You can definitely start with a great idea – but it doesn’t have to be unique. If you can do something better than the rest, you are in business!

This means that anybody could be an entrepreneur, but it’s not always that simple as we found out…

The Workshops

During the day, we had various workshops with the EiA team to learn how to speak in public, generate ideas, build brands, and acquire some sales and marketing techniques.

My favourite part of the day has to be the Trading Game at the end of the day, where we brought our final products/services and brands to the ‘market’ (the school sports hall) to try to sell to the ‘public’ (staff).

It was incredibly competitive (the poor teachers had 5-10 people pestering them to try and sell wares!) but very valuable and quite fun!

What I Learnt

Since this was still early on in the year, I didn’t know many of the new people so it was great to get put in teams with people I didn’t know very well. Team working skills… Level up!

The workshop on public speaking was really good for an introvert like me – you can never get enough practice at it.

Entrepreneurship definitely isn’t just for those with genius ideas. So long as you have the drive and the confidence to start a business, you too can be an entrepreneur no matter what age you are!

Are any of you entrepreneurs? Do you want to own your own business? Let me know in the comments! If you want some business ideas, check out this post here.