An Educational Games Entrepreneur
An Educational Games Entrepreneur!
The following article first appeared in www.50connect.co.uk and is reproduced with their kind permission
Alistair Owens, managing director of Keen2Learn and winner of the profIT@50 competition, talks to 50Connect.
Alistair Owens, age 58, established his company Keen2Learn in 2006. It sells educational products, giving parents access to the same teaching resources, games, software and activities used in schools to support the National Curriculum. Eight months later he won Intel’s profIT@50competition, a nationwide search for the most promising over 50s entrepreneur.
Setting up your own business and being over 50 are very compatible, according to Alistair.
“It allows you to use all those skills that you may not be aware that you’ve built up over the years. An element of maturity means that you can approach things with a very level head rather than being too impatient. In any start-up business it is a question of sticking with it and I feel somebody over 50 has probably got a lot more determination to stay the course.”
Retirement is some way off for Alistair, currently he prefers being at work.
“Running your own business requires working into the evenings and over the weekends and I’m getting a tremendous buzz from doing that, far more than if I did those sort of hours in employment for a third party.”
His advice for other over 50s hoping to start a business begins with careful planning.
“It’s a question of mapping out the business plan - which you need to do anyway before you can seek advice from accountants and banks - but also to map out the time-scale. We all like to think we’re going to hit the glory target within a few months - the reality takes much longer.”
“Analyse how long you think it will take for a turnaround to be achieved, then look at the resources for you to keep the momentum going based on that, and work out a plan possibly even doubling that timespan, because if you think it’s going to take six months to achieve you really need to budget for a year, and make certain that you’re going to give it your best shot.”
Alistair also explains the pros and cons of working as a family company.
“You can use a rapport whereby your “other half” has an equal share and can give you respective advice. If you had an employee in the early stages he or she would tend to be very reactive, and in the early days you need somebody who’s very proactive, who can speak their mind as to what is possible and what is not, so that is a real benefit that I have with the family being involved. They tell me where they think I’m overstepping the mark or being too adventurous and what is a practical campaign that we can actually go with.”
“The disadvantage is obviously that because of the closeness of the relationship you often have interesting debate - and argument - that you probably wouldn’t get in normal circumstances, so we have our moments as well!”
There is plenty that Alistair enjoys about his job.
“Putting something together on the website, making changes and keeping it refreshed and up to date, because of the dynamics of that I get a real buzz. I also feel that I’m actually putting something back - the product is going to help schoolchildren progress so there’s a fantastic altruistic aspect to it as well. How often do you come up with a commercial proposition that has such a significant benefit to schoolchildren?”
It was this idea that enabled Alistair to win profIT@50, and in turn the competition has helped Alistair’s business.
“It gave us a huge boost because we achieved that award only 8 months after launching the website. In any start-up business it can be very lonely because you’re putting a lot of effort in your own right behind the scenes. The fact that third parties, especially the shape and size of Intel, have actually recognised that we had a very interesting company with huge potential, gave us a significant step forward in confidence.”
As winner, Alistair enjoyed a mentoring session with former Dragon’s Den judge Simon Woodroffe, and another with Intel’s Director of Public Affairs, Tristan Wilkinson. He found both extremely positive.
“Simon Woodroffe is a clear strong thinker, full of ideas, and he has given us a significant amount of advice that we’ve been able to adopt and get the benefit from. It’s like having the equivalent of about five or six pairs of other eyes looking at the business. Tristan Wilkinson has an amazingly clear view of the role that technology will play in the future of communications in education”
Intel also awarded Alistair an £8,000 grant.
“That allowed us to go with a promotional campaign, and helped us towards the redesign of the website. Later Simon introduced us to Rachel Elnaugh, another Dragons Den entrepreneur who gave us further invaluable start up advice”
Overall Alistair would recommend entering an entrepreneur competition.
“It’s the actual process of entering - I had to make a statement where we had to come up with a business plan, what we intended to do and how we were doing it. That was six months after we started, so it was a very good exercise to make you think about why you are different and what your plan actually is.”
Alistair came up with the idea for the business after being a parent with two children at school, and having 20 years of experience in marketing, latterly in the distribution of educational products.
“Going along to parents’ night, the teacher would say how the kids were getting on, and then I’d discover if they’d fallen behind. I always felt isolated from the solution - 15 years ago teaching resources were very much classroom based, and I would have appreciated some means of helping instead of it all being down to the teacher. With technology moving on and the presence of DVDs, CD ROMS and modern teaching resources, I spotted that many of these products being sold to schools for teachers to use also represented a fantastic way for parents to reinforce lessons at home. Now parents are able to respond quickly rather than waiting for that end of term report when it’s too late, they’re able to help their child immediately if he or she starts to slip behind.”
The Keen2Learn website sells the same teaching resources:- maths games English games and science games etc. that are used in schools, that can help children catch up.
“A teacher can tell a parent or grandparent which products to match in order to help a child who’s struggling with the times tables or not too good at spelling. With 30 others in the classroom how many kids will put their hand up to say to the teacher, ‘I didn’t understand that’? The child tends to keep their hand down and muddle on. These are packages they can do at home and increase their confidence and competence. at their own pace”
The idea of using the products at home is that practice makes perfect.
“We retain about 5 percent of what we hear in a classroom, but if you practice the lesson you retain up to 75 percent. Practice to reinforce the lesson is the one key area that the parent can easily adopt, and probably the most difficult for the teacher to incorporate. In a 45 minute lesson there’s probably 20-25 minutes actually available for teaching - if you take in registration, settling the class down, handing out and collecting homework - so the opportunity to practice is fairly limited. At home the child has time to go over the lesson and really get to know it well, and can do it at their own natural pace.”
The products are intended to be easy to use at home for non-teachers, and enable the family to be more interactive with what’s going on at school.
“People feel that they’re not teachers so how can they do this, but because the products are teaching resources all are very straightforward. They’re self-explanatory and there are teaching notes included as to how to handle them. The child will have been introduced to the subject at school so there’s a connection between what the teacher says and what this programme says.”
It doesn’t have to be a big undertaking, little and often is the way.
“Parents and grandparents spend 20 percent more time with children now than 15 years ago, so within the space of a generation there’s a real opportunity to actually reinforce lessons. You don’t have to change your lifestyle dramatically, it just means applying that time in a constructive manner.”
More information can be found at: www.keen2learn.co.uk
By Cherry Butler of www.50connect.co.uk
50Connect is the UK’s largest website for today’s over 50s.
