From dream to reality for young founders

In the space of one room at One Admiralty Building in London, we welcomed major players and partners who spend their time encouraging and supporting young people to start and grow businesses. The purpose of the gathering? To discuss a new Young Founder category set to be launched this year as part of The King’s Awards for Enterprise.

What is the plural for a group of enterprise champions?

I’ve decided it should be called a posse! This posse of wonderful people (seen above) spared their time on the day before Good Friday to come together and offer input on a new Award that will shine a spotlight on the next generation of UK talent. So, what’s it all about?

Introducing the Young Founder category …

In the Small Business Plan launched by the Prime Minister in July 2025, one of the commitments was to; ‘Back the next generation of young entrepreneurs, by promoting enterprise education and competitions in schools, colleges and universities, and launching a new ‘Youth Entrepreneur’ category of the King’s Awards for Enterprise.’

The team running the Awards is keen for the new category to be promoted to all young founders eligible to apply, with eligibility connected to age (18-30), revenue, employee headcount, and/or investment levels.

In the room were enterprise influencers, curriculum creators, support providers, policy makers and a smattering of young founders themselves.

They all confirmed commitment to see the Award get off to its best start from year one. This is on the basis that enterprise is becoming the default career choice for many young people and, indeed, the potential for future generations to be financially confident is something recognised by major finance companies with an interesting piece in City AM this week stating that ‘the classroom has become the new frontier for the British banking battle’ and as Monzo announced it had reached 15 million customers, ‘one key detail showed 1m of those Monzonauts, as the bank calls them, came from under-16s.’ <- wow! From my own Office’s perspective, we want to ensure payment education is in-built from a young age so early-stage founders know their rights when it comes to getting invoices settled.

Back to the Award, three key points came from the discussion:

• That the Young Founder Award be seen as an aspiration – something to which new start-ups aspire to apply for and secure, with potential for preparation training to be delivered as young as primary school level.
• Recognition that the Award offers acceleration – what an honour to attach The King’s Awards for Enterprise emblem to your product or service for a period of 5 years, and what an amazing network of businesses into which to connect, being Award alumni, who are some of the finest businesses trading in the UK.
• Role model expectation of Awardees – in that in securing the Award, these individuals will be role models for other young people wanting to build great businesses in Britain. They will hopefully agree to speak in schools/colleges/Universities about their journey to date.

I left the session feeling invigorated that with this level of backing and support for the launch, we will indeed see a quality first year of entries. Applications open on 6 May. Find out more here and thank you to co-host Jimmy McLoughlin OBE and to all who gave time and input at the session; Simon Squibb, Hannah Berry, Paul Lewis, Rupinder Drew, Stuart Parker-Tyreman, Philip Salter, Sam Teale, Anita Tiessen, Ben Towers MBE, Harrison Turner, Olivia White, Ranjeet Kharé, Fabian Piga, Nichola Bruno, Chloe (Palser) Evans