Beth Coslett, the winner of my Young Woman of Business Award, has collected another award. This time Young Enterprise in their 50th Anniversary Year, have given Beth their top achievement award - the Waterloo Foundation Award.
Awarded to those Alumni who are recognised as having outstanding achievement since their YE experience, gives recognition to both the winner and the YE scheme.
YE recently published their report "Impact: 50 Years of Young Enterprise", which shows (amongst other things) that YE participation can double the success of future endeavours by participants.
A doubling of success, simply because the aspiring entrepreneurs had help and support in their earliest learning experiences.
Doubling success in any field, regardless of it's economic impact, is extremely impressive but doubling the success of those who build a nations economic future is simply outstanding.
Whilst I cannot hope to be able to help Beth with that degree of improvement on her (already) excellent skills, determination and drive - I hope that we'll be able to do more together than she would have alone.
Meeting in Cardiff with her recently, we spent a few hours running through the fundamentals of her target market, and how to 'touch' as many of them as possible. No mean feat in a city that boasts tens of thousands of suitable customers, but a challenge that Beth seemed more than 'up for'.
What was extremely satisfying was knowing that I was helping Beth to reach her own conclusions. I wasn't there to give her the answers, and Beth wasn't looking for me to provide solutions - we worked together to help Beth to reach her own conclusions.
YE have a similar approach - they guide their participants towards desired outcomes, they do not do it for them.
Helping our future business people is something that most of us could do - hopefully at least partly as well as Young Enterprise have in the last 50 years.