The road to career or business success can take many twistsand turns. For some young people the conventionaluniversity-internship-graduate-job-opening path with a large corporate doesn’t tick the boxes. They want to do things their way, they want to get there quicker, but most of all they want to follow their passion.
Great ideas don’t have to come out of formal ‘think-outside-the-box’ brainstorming sessions run by expensive facilitators in hotel conference rooms. Inspiration can strike at any time, and ideas can take shape over a kitchen table, in a bedroom or coffee shop. Often, what starts as a hobby can evolve into a business. And for a new breed of young entrepreneurs (‘young-trepreneurs’) it’s proving a satisfying, successful journey.
In 2000 a young Janine Allis opened her first Boost Juice outlet in Australia. It was born out of a passion to ‘create a product that could make being healthy easy’. Importantly she‘didn’t want to work for anyone’, and wanted to ‘control my own destiny’. And now, 580 outlets in 13 countries later, leaving school at 16 and later following a passion was clearly a move that worked for the young Ms Allis.
A generation or so later young people in the UK aresuccessfully determining their own business journey. The team at AllDayPA, wants to encourage more young people to do just that and have looked at the unconventional career paths of 30 successful young people. There are some fascinating, inspiring stories:
– Absolute Collagen – co-founded by Darcy Laceby after discovering the advantages of collagen, Laceby created the bestselling collagen drink. The business is now estimated to be worth £3M.
– Pasta Evangelists – the passion is evident in the name – is now worth a reported £40M, and that after a shaky start being rejected on Dragons’ Den and being labelled ‘pasta la disaster’. Finn Lagun, 28-year-old co-founder can afford to reflect, contentedly, on sticking with it.
– Steven Bartlett started his social media marketing company, The Social Chain, from his bedroom at the age of 21. The business now has over 15 million followers.
In Nottingham where I live, many young people are devotees of the uber-cool Sneakrverse, a city centre fashion outletopened by the then 19-year-old student, Lashon James in 2021.
‘Follow your dreams’ is a phrase often rolled-out to young people. It can be a daunting thought, but for many it can turn out to be the best decision they ever made.
This blog article was written in collaboration with alldayPA
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