Entrepreneurs Forum

11th March 2010 - 800 Young Hopefuls Use Their Loaf At Youth Conference

800 Young Hopefuls Use Their Loaf At Youth Conference

Over 800 budding entrepreneurs from schools and colleges across the region gathered yesterday (10th March) at the Use Your Loaf conference at Rainton Meadows Arena, Houghton-le-Spring to hear valuable words of wisdom from a host of the UK’s leading young tycoons.

In association with the Entrepreneurs’ Forum ‘if we can you can’ campaign, Use Your Loaf was hosted by Paul Campbell of the Amazing Group who introduced guest speakers to share their knowledge and experience to inspire the next generation of business brains.

Ambitious young people attended from schools and colleges across the region to see the exciting line-up of speakers which included North East based entrepreneurs Julian Leighton from digital media agency Orange Bus, 18 year old Jonathan Grubin founder of MiniG media, Darren Williams from Hair X Tensions and Matt Scott founder of specialist trainers MES footwear.

Dan Germain from Innocent Smoothies, Young Entrepreneur of the Year - 23 year old Emily Cummins, Trunki inventor of Dragon’s Den fame Rob Law, SuperJam creator Fraser Doherty also shared experiences and stories and were on hand to offer expert advice.

Victoria Rought from the Entrepreneurs’ Forum said: “Following the success of last year’s Cloud9 youth summit, we were determined to secure another fantastic line up to inspire the region’s future business brains.

“The combination of wisdom, passion, vision, drive and determination shared by our speakers has been great and the feedback has already positioned them as role models for these students.

“We have been overwhelmed at another phenomenal turnout and it just goes to show that all it takes is inspirational people telling their stories to fire up the passion in young people to make them believe that they too could achieve that amount of success. We have all had a fantastic day!”

Interactive topic stations, enterprise trading areas and a range of materials available on the day also inspired many of the students to find out more.

17 year old Nikki Newman from Newcastle College said: “I am doing an advanced creative media diploma at the performance academy at Newcastle College so it was really interesting for me to find out how to use creativity in business. The speakers’ stories are inspiring and it had certainly encouraged me to take action for my future.”

An 18 year old student from Emmanuel College, Gateshead added: “I was really looking forward to listening to Dan Germain and Julian Leighton mainly as I was really interested in what they had to say. All of the speakers today have motivated me to think about setting up a business myself in the future. It has been such a great day with so much going on!”

Julian Leighton from digital media design agency Orange Bus was impressed by the enthusiasm of the students. He said: “It’s amazing to see so many passionate young people taking an interest in what we do and how we did it. If I had a conference like this to go to when I was younger with all of this useful advice, I probably would have got to where I am now a lot easier!”

In between talks, hand-picked local bands Brilliant Minds and Polarsets from Newcastle entertained students in the main auditorium.

Use Your Loaf is a partnership between the key organisations involved in education across the North East including Enterprise UK, Enterprise Learning Partnerships, Young Enterprise, the Prince’s trust, Young Chambers and education business partnerships and was free for students to attend.

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