KS4 / GCSE Business: How to be an entrepreneur

Hundreds of different businesses make a festival a festival. From poncho sellers to ice cream vendors, they all started as someone's money-making bright idea. You see, it's all about spotting a gap in the market and then using your head to make a bit of cash. Do that and you'll be well on your way to becoming a full-on entrepreneur.

Matt Pickup and his friends spotted an opportunity in 2004 and have never looked back. He might look like any other festival-goer, but the tent we're pitching is one of 350 we've got to get through. This could take a while! Matt is a co-owner of tent hire company Tangerine Fields. Here at Reading, their 350 tents can be rented for up to £90 per person. Last year the company turned over one million pounds. It's a classic tale of spotting and seizing an opportunity.

Myself and my business partners were at the Big Chill Festival. We were really tired and just wanted to get home on the Monday morning and had noticed that others were obviously in the same frame of mind but they just couldn't be bothered to take their tents down so they'd bought and pitched them and left them. And so we thought, if people are willing to do that, they'd be willing to not buy the tent, not pitch it and leave it.

As simple as that!

Er, yeah. It was a simple idea that took off.

How did it go from the idea to becoming a proper business?

We took a risk and invested some money in buying some tents. Spoke to the Big Chill Festival and laid out our idea to them. It seemed quite popular and from there it doubled and doubled in size each year and now we've moved up to 26 festivals this summer.

If Matt needed any more inspiration, he need look no further than some of our most successful entrepreneurs.

You're fired.

Scary Lord Sugar began his business life trading out of a van and is now worth £770 million. Levi Roots charmed the Dragons in the den and within a year was shifting 40,000 bottles of his Reggae Reggae Sauce a week. And let's not forget Posh Spice, whose clothing range has helped push brand Beckham's worth up to an eye-watering £165 million.

What those guys have got, apart from a big bank balance, are some special qualities that make them top entrepreneurs. But what exactly are those qualities?

Confident and good at talking to people. If you're shy I don't think you're going to get anywhere.

Smart and well presented. Yeah, dress well, good first impression.

Guts, I think. I think you have to be really brave because it's all about taking chances and working out whether gambles are worth doing.

There's no magic formula for being an entrepreneur, but there are qualities which could help. Creativity is essential for transforming an opportunity into a real business idea. Guts - starting up a new business is always a risk, so you need to be daring to be successful. Drive - getting an idea off the ground isn't easy, but with determination you could hit the big time. Even some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs have had failures in the past.

So it's all very well having a great idea. The key is putting that idea into practice, like the traders are doing here. Once you've had your idea, you need to think about the practicalities. Before starting, think about whether you might be able to legally protect your idea against copying. Where are you going to base your business? If you've got an ice cream van, don't park it on a quiet country lane. Instead, go to a festival with loads of people with cash to spend. Finally, what sort of business model best suits your idea? Should you act as a sole trader? Or do you need to form a limited company?

But one of the most important things to think about is the big R. And by the big R I mean research. And I don't just mean buying a few books and surfing the web! To find out more, I've ditched the wellies and left the music behind to meet a man who spotted a - how can I put it? An "interesting" opportunity at a festival and backed it up with some hefty market research.

This is Richard Wharton, and the cardboard box he's putting together is his solution to an age-old festival problem - yes, going to the toilet.

I'm at my festival, I've got to go, so I whip this out and just sit?

Yeah, absolutely. It'll take your weight.

It'll take my weight?

Yeah, that'll take up to 20 stone in weight.

And then do my business?

Yeah.

Festival lover Richard came up with the idea in 1989 after visiting the toilets at Glastonbury.

Once you had the idea, what did you do in of market research?

We made up just short of 300 and gave them away to mates, festival-goers to trial out, and what we found from that was we had a Marmite product. Some found it embarrassing to use in their own tent, other people didn't care at all, and at 3 o'clock in the morning at a festival, it was a godsend.

Sending out samples as Richard did is one of many market research methods. The other options include field research. That's asking people their opinion - in person, on the phone, or online. Desk research. Gathering information related to your idea from books and the internet. Research can be qualitative - about people's reaction to the product. Do they think it's a good idea? Or quantitative - gauging the number of people who'd actually be willing to pay for it.

So being an entrepreneur is more than just coming up with an idea. You have to take a calculated risk and actually do something with those ideas. And if you do, with the right qualities, you never know, you too could be sat on a fortune! And if you'll excuse me, I need some privacy now, so… cheers.