Last week one of London’s most successful restaurateurs described to me how he started in the catering trade. Like so many, it is a tale of chance. He trained to become a teacher, but hated it, and so fell into bartending – and from there graduated to waiting tables, and then managing a restaurant. Now he has half a dozen, and his business is booming.
The most fascinating chapter of every business biography is what I call the “formative phase”: the moment when an entrepreneur decides which industry to enter and gets the early breaks. So often it is pure serendipity – there is no grand plan, no career map. It is more of a haphazard stumble, and then a dawning sense of opportunity that is seized upon by those destined to become entrepreneurs.
A formal education for so many professions means an ordered sequence of steps. I accept that this is entirely necessary for many walks of life. But for entrepreneurship there is no syllabus, no degree. It is a journey in self-education.