Make Your Mark Blog

One tasty winner!

Yesterday saw the finale of the Make Your Mark in the Markets competition and a few of us trotted along to find out more. We ended up in the very plush surrounding of a parliamentary reception and chatted to some of the finalists whilst sipping tasty juices and eating scrummy cakes.

It was then time to find out who the winner was so we all trooped into the hall. After a suspenseful silence (as suspenseful as some of the best reality talent shows, only with more cake) Denise announced that Matthew Crawford of Easy’Nuh was to be crowned king of the Markets!

Role Models ……what it is all about.

Well first of all I am the New Role Models Manager here at Make Your Mark.

Here at Make Your Mark we will be sharing much more inspiring stories of the beginning of the enterprise journey.

We will be exploring what it’s like to be a parent of an entrepreneur getting the background knowledge of what it’s really like to support our great entrepreneurs the highs and the lows. This is a chance influence others parents who might be about to take a step into the unknowns of supporting an entrepreneur.

The HSBC’s Future of Business report has identified four new types of future entrepreneurs.

1) The Referral Economists: commercially-minded folk who have emerged from the social networking boom. 2) The Slash Slash Careerist: the product of the MySpace School of business who see themselves as brands and their customers as fans. 3) The Collaborateer: walks the fine line between information and piracy where everything is negotiable.

And 4) The Transpreneur: an elite new breed of super-global entrepreneur with connections and workspaces all over the world, are set to dominate the British business environment.

At last I can share the details of a new project called Village SOS, a partnership between the BBC and the Big Lottery Fund (BIG) which will challenge villages to come up with brilliant ideas for new businesses to help revive their communities. Village SOS will invite rural communities with lots of enthusiasm and a great business idea - from retailing to manufacturing, the arts to leisure - to apply for Lottery funding to help breathe new life into their area, create new jobs and improve the quality of life for local people.

Find of the day - http://www.cardsofchange.com/. The Cardsofchange site is a gallery of business cards from employees who’ve recently been made redundant, which sounds depressing but really isn’t. The cards have all been updated with a plan, a motto, an idea or a project. Some of them just tell you what the person is up to now (like planting a tree or spending less, living more), and everyone who has posted a card sounds like they’ve found something good in their situation. I like the one from this entrepreneurial type person now working from their kitchen. Definitely worth a look - there are some lots of nice images, and some really funny and inspiring messages.

Well it looks like the British summer arrived this weekend and to celebrate I decided to place myself in my local park (Peckham Rye Park for those who live on the right side of the river) for much olives eating and ice-cream consuming.

Now, it wouldn’t do for me to over exert myself and break a sweat, so much of my picnic goodness came from the shops, a hop, skip and a jump away. Not only were all my purchases yummy but it also felt really good to be supporting my local businesses. And flicking through The Sun today it looks like they agree.

We are glad to feature Rajeeb Dey, founder of enternships.com, as a guest blogger at Make Your Mark today:

“The story is a familiar one…on the one hand, large corporates are scaling back recruitment drives leaving graduates and university students with few ‘traditional’ routes to find experience. On the other, start-ups and small/medium businesses (SMEs) need highly skilled, motivated and creative people to roll their sleeves up and get involved in working with them in growing their businesses. These small firms struggle to find efficient ways to reach out to these candidates as they do not have the time or budgets to go out on campuses to do the traditional ‘milkround’.