Make Your Mark Blog

The UnLtd Awards are open to all you budding social entrepreneurs out there.

Receive between £500 and £20,000 to really give your project the boost it needs.

There are 2 levels of awards

Level 1 Awards

 So whatever stage your business or business idea is at, check out the UnLtd website to see how they could help you!

Are you eligible?

Take a simple questionnaire for Level 1 or Level 2

See the UnLtd website for more details: www.unltd.org.uk

The students change the lives of others and in the process develop the valuable skills they will need to be successful in business, together with a sense of responsibility towards their community, with an emphasis on sustainability.

Just a reminder that  Evans Easyspace are offering their Evans Business Centres FREE of charge to anyone wanting to run a speednetworking event during Enterprise Week 2008. They have over 50 centres across the UK, 6 of which are in the North East (Darlington, Durham, Middlesbrough, Newton Aycliffe, Newton Aycliffe Incubation Centre, North Shields)

See: http://www.enterpriseweek.org.uk/get_involved_in/global_activities for more info on speed networking

The O2 X Awards  is a  nationwide search for the best innovative and entrepreneurial small businesses in the UK.

They are looking for small businesses (under 50 employees) in the following arenas

• Fashion (supported by Grazia)
• Technology & innovation (supported by Shortlist)
• Food & drink (supported by Observer Food Monthly)
• Music (supported by Music Week)

If you would like to enter or know of anyone who might qualify, please find an entry form:

 http://www.o2blueroom.co.uk/Business/XAwards/UserData.aspx

Good Luck! 

I recently met Beccy Earnshaw from SCHOOLS NorthEast.

SCHOOLS NorthEast represents all primary, secondary, maintained, independent and special schools in the North East.

It seeks to promote the great work being done in the North East to other local schools and also nationally. It seeks to promote the voice of head teachers, support staff development and help with employer engagement at a strategic level.

SCHOOLS NorthEast has some great projects in the pipeline and we look forward to working with them. To find out more, visit the website

Earlier this week Make Your Mark hosted a women’s only Ambassador Event at Wild Rose Florist in Hartlepool.

Our thanks to Natalie Mullen for proving such a lovely venue. The shop smelt and looked GORGEOUS! Nathalie is a successful young entrepreneur and now employs four people. She has always wanted her own florists and got her first break by recommendation and feels that her business has grown on recommendations.

There was some great networking going on at the event and we were pleased that our guests left with some useful new contacts.  

We played a flower related game to get to know each other a little better. We found out that we have 2 nettles in the office as well as a daffodil and a white delphinium, but can you guess who is who? Careful now…….

Guests (and flowers!) at the event included:

Rachel Powell, Fashion Network Limited, ethical fashion designer

Yvette Sheeky, Penelopes Pitstops Ltd, female friendly vehicle maintenance, MOT and repair

Maureen Colohan, Unique Solutions, providing approaches to support key individuals in business through times of stress or difficulty.

Claire Kruman & Becky Lambton, Orchid Marketing Ltd, marketing and event management consultants.

Melanie Rutherford,  Melanie Rutherford Enterprises, dance instructor

 ……Marigolds, lost of roses, ivy, daisies, a yucca tree, a freesia and a water lily, nettles, a daffodil and a white delphinium … but I’m still not saying who is who!

I’m sure my colleagues would agree that it is inspiring to see local women making their ideas happen and setting up their own ventures.

Are you interested in finding out a little more about becoming an Ambassador (male or female)? Please contact Ann Lee on 01642 451827. 

The Make Your Mark team here in the North East recently had some great photography training courtesy of Make Your Mark Ambassador, Michael Kelly of Construct photographic . Pamela, Ann, Katy and I learned so much from the session. Having started the session not knowing my Aperture from my Exposure, I left so much more confident.

Michael showed us the science behind the camera, how to select the right settings and most importantly for us novices….how to compose a great picture! Look out for some seriously good photos from the Make Your Mark North East team coming soon!!

Michael does some great work, really innovative. Check out this website.

PLTS are:

• team working
• independent enquiry
• self-management
• reflective learning
• effective participation
• creative thinking

For example, regarding INDEPENDENT ENQUIRY

The student-led aspects of the Make Your Mark Club, and the journey of discovery embarked on to make an idea happen enable the following skills to be developed: 

• Forming a realistic plan and carrying it out
• identifying relevant questions to problems, and seeking out the answers
• realising the consequences of decisions
• developing confidence in decision-making
• recognising the validity of other peoples beliefs/opinions
• presenting arguments that are backed with appropriate evidence.

Thousands of young people all over the UK are making their mark at school or college and joining the Make Your Mark Club.

If you would like to learn more about the Make Your Mark Club, please visit the website or get in touch with your local Make Your Mark team. If you’re based in the North East, that’s me! Call Julie on 01642 451826

So…. my original post  went like this…

A man has left 17 camels to his 3 sons. He has left half the camels to his eldest son, a third to his middle son, and a ninth to his youngest. The 3 sons have been trying to divide up their inheritance but can’t find a solution that satisfies them all since 17 cannot be divided by 2, 3 or 9…

I got some fantastic solutions emailed to me and posted on line. Thank you to everyone you responded! You are all much more creative and enterprising than me!!!

I’d get there using maths…… so…..

I’d ask Marilise to purchase a camel on her up and coming journey to sunnier climes….

That would give the sons 18 camels momentarily…

The eldest son could claim half the camels (9 camels), the middle son could take his third of the inheritance (6 camels) and the youngest could have his ninth (2 camels)

And Marilise could have her camel back.. I hope it will come in useful!!! 

Bydales Technology College in Redcar  are hosting a Fashion Show, with staff and pupils showcasing fairtrade & sustainable clothing. The students have bought clothes from charity shops and have even designed fairtrade t-shirts.

Their aim is to raise awareness of green issues and make some money for school projects while doing so.

The fashion show  takes place  tonight at 7:30pm in Bydales Main Hall. The entrance fee is £2.

We can’t wait to hear how it goes!

Personal learning and thinking skills (PLTS), together with functional English, mathematics, and ICT, cover the areas of competence that are most often demanded by employers. 

PLTS are:

• team working
• independent enquiry
• self-management
• reflective learning
• effective participation
• creative thinking

For example, regarding TEAM WORKING…

One of the key aims of the Make Your Mark Club is to form student-led groups who can work together to make enterprising ideas happen.

The Make Your Mark Club offers a way to build competency in team working outside of lesson time, developing young people’s confidence in forging new working relationships.

Through the Make Your Mark Club, students can also:

• learn how to adapt to new situations – running live enterprises means that they will need to respond to opportunities, unexpetcted outcomes and take on new roles within the group.
• work towards a shared outcome – the ideas brought to life through the Make Your Mark Club should be agreed upon by all club members.
• develop a sense of personal responsibility: each young person should understand the Club’s project is their business, and therefore their responsibility, rather than anyone else’s.
• negotiate and solve problems in response to challenges they may encounter as they bring ideas to life.

Thousands of young people all over the UK are making their mark at school or college and joining the Make Your Mark Club.

If you would like to learn more about the Make Your Mark Club, please visit the website or get in touch with your local Make Your Mark team. If you’re based in the North East, that’s me! Call Julie on 01642 451826

The weird thing about being a professional poker player is that in order to be able to make your rent money at the end of every month… you must be prepared to lose two poker hands out of every five you play. And I’ll let you into a little secret… no matter how long you do it for and how much you understand that fact rationally it never gets emotionally any easier. The simple fact of the matter is that as human beings we are hardwired to hate failing.

Like most aspects of our psyche, our aversion to failure is something that has given us an evolutionary advantage or the most part. It protects us from death for one thing. Which is good. But mostly is encourages us to raise our game so that we succeed at most of what we take on. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this.

The problem came about half a million years ago when we started to think intelligently about what we were doing and - realising that we didn’t like failing - we started as a species to take on tasks at which we had a high chance of success. Easy tasks in other words. Tasks at which we have a high chance of succeeding. And the problem with this is that progress and innovation usually require us to tackle difficult problems; problems which require us to fail in the short term in order to achieve long term success.

Indeed, if you study the lives and approaches of the most successful people throughout history, you find that they appear to have embraced failure in their lives a lot more than apparently much less “successful” people.

Soichiro Honda - the man who built the Honda empire from nothing - said the following: “Many people dream of success but to me success can only be achieved for repeated failure and introspection. Indeed my success results from 1% of my work which results from the 99% that we call failure.”

Similarly, Michael Jordan,the most successful basketball player in history said the following about his own success: “I have missed 9000 baskets, lost 300 games of basketball and 27 times I have called for the ball in the dying seconds and charged myself with scoring and I have failed. I fail and fail and fail and that is why I succeed.”

And even on the level of a lifetime. Take a look at the life history of Abraham Lincoln before he became president of the United States:

Failed in Business in 1831
Defeated for Legislature in 1832
Second Business Failure 1833
Nervous Breakdown in 1836
Defeated for Speaker in 1838
Defeated for Congress in 1848
Defeated for Senate in 1855
Defeated for Vice President 1856
Defeated for Senate in 1858
Elected President in 1860

The fact of the matter is that this pattern of short term failures and long term success is how we progress as a species. Just like the poker player who has to lose 2 out of every 5 hands he plays in order to achieve his long term goals, we need to start to embrace more short term failures in order to achieve all of our long term goals.

So how do we do this? Traditional wisdom says that we need to overcome our fear of failure. I would say that being a professional poker player taught me the fallacy of this theory. We cannot somehow overcome that which makes us uniquely human. Instead we can embrace this fear as one of the most motivational forces available to us as humans - but crucially we need to define failure NOT as a short term phenomenon; a fear NOT of the rejections and setbacks that we will inevitably endure in our lives. But rather we need to define failure as a fear of LONG TERM FAILURE; as a failure to achieve our overall objectives against which we are ultimately going to decide how successful we have been. Because the fear of THIS failure will motivate us to endure all the necessary short term failures in the process of achieving long term success.

Caspar Berry is a man of many talents. From an early role in Byker Grove alongside Ant and Dec, he has been a professional poker player in Las Vegas, television presenter and has even been the poker adviser for the James Bond film Casino Royale! He returned to the North East to set up Twenty First Century Media, the fastest growing audio visual media company in the region, and is now an inspirational speaker about leadership, decision making, innovating and risk taking. Find out more about Caspar.

A very warm welcome to our new North East Make Your Mark Clubs, many of whom will be officially forming in September.

We welcome to the enterprising students at:

St Bede’s Catholic Comprehensive School, Fyndoune Community College, Sunnydale Community College for Maths and Computing, The Oaks Secondary School, Greenfield School, Wolsingham School, Spennymoor School, Longbenton Community College, Cleaswell Hill School and City of Sunderland College.

These students will form part of a huge national network of schools and colleges, 43 of which are in the North East.

We also have Clubs registered at the following North East schools and colleges:

Abbey Hill School & Technology College, Ashdale, Carmel RC Technology College, Conyers School, , Hartlepool Sixth Form College, Haydon Bridge High School, Hirst Park Middle School, Kings Academy School, Kings Manor School, Longfield Comprehensive School, Norton Humanities College, Pathways, Prior Pursglove, St Bede’s Catholic Comprehensive School, St David’s RC Technology College, St Hild’s Church of England, St Mary’s Catholic Comprehensive School, St Michael’s Roman Catholic VA Comprehensive School, St Peter’s Roman Catholic VA Comprehensive School, Thornaby Community School, English Martyrs, Bydales Comprehensive School, Unity City Academy, Berwick Community High School, Castle View School, Catcote School, Darlington Education Village, Epinay School, Ferryhill B&E College, Marden High School, Nunthorpe School, Park View Community School and Staindrop Business & Enterprise College

I look forward to hearing all about the enterprising activities the students will be involved in over the coming school year!

If you would like to know more about the Club, feel free to get in touch or visit our Club website

I went to an interesting networking meeting this morning. VERY early start - I arrived at 6:30 - but it was well worth it!

The networking event was a BNI meeting (Stockton-on-Tees Chapter), with people from small and big businesses attending. I met people with connections to local schools as well as business people who would like to get involved in the campaign. My thanks to Sue Dixon for inviting me along. I met Sue a few weeks ago when I gave a presentation to the Stockton Business Forum.

For me, the meeting reminded me of what networking is all about - it’s not merely about collecting business cards, its about increasing your circle of influence, making good contacts that will allow you to work with others to achieve mutually beneficial goals. You’ll see a list of networking events on our main site should you wish to attend any networking meetings yourselves.

I am really keen on speaking to North East business people who would like to get involved in our campaign. Perhaps you would like to set real enterprise challenges e.g. design challenges or real business problems, support and guide young people in planning their own business ventures or show them what is possible for them in their future

What’s in it for you?

Getting involved will help provide evidence of quality standards such a IIP and will tick those Corporate Social Responsibility boxes, but it is about so much more than that.

You could be working with young agile creative minds, help develop the necessary skills in your future workforce, raise the profile of your business, generate lots of positive PR, provide your staff self development opportunities, market test some of your products with your potential customers and most importantly make a difference, have fun and take the opportunity for you to be inspired by our young people!

If you are based in the North East and would like to get involved, please get in touch:

Julie, Make Your Mark, North East 01642 451826