As we approach the festive season, there is the inevitable challenge of finding suitable gifts.
The best Christmas present I think you can give someone is encouragement that they should start that new business.
In the first instance, you should kick some ideas around with a friend who has the opposite set of skills to yourself. If you are good at starting things, they should be a good finisher; if you are introvert, they should be an extrovert; if you are bad with money, then they should understand finance, and so on.
You need to identify a problem and find people who trust you enough to pay you to take that problem away. If you can then deliver your product or service profitably, you have the basis for a business.
After that, the best advice I can give is to be three things: local, reliable and nice. People prefer to buy from someone close by, they want you to deliver and to be easy to deal with.
If you follow these simple rules, you will be successful.
Many of the entrepreneurs I meet have their own interesting Christmas gift ideas.
Shaylesh Patel of Healthy Planet had the traditional career route of first working for a big accountancy firm, and then as financial director of an online travel company.
When he became a father, he began to worry about a report that said, for the first time in recent history, that the life expectancy of his children was less than his own. Seeing the connection between the way we lead our lives and its effect on our health and the planet, he formed Healthy Planet with a friend, a geographer.
Healthy Planet has a simple premise. Through the website, you adopt some land and everything on it, in one of the 77,000 national parks around the world. Some 90 per cent of the money you provide goes straight to that land and you can choose which local sustainability project you wish to support.
For example, if you are concerned about the Amazonian rainforest, you can cover the costs of a park ranger who will help prevent illegal logging in your chosen area.
Patel has teamed up with Google Earth, so you can monitor your land directly.
Healthy Planet is already a great success. Individuals adopt land as gifts or for themselves, while schools use it for fundraising as well as geography, information and communication technology and citizenship projects. Large organisations use their corporate social responsibility budgets to help save the planet in a specific and efficient way.
The most interesting aspect of Healthy Planet is that, while it is a registered charity, it is also a bona fide social enterprise. This means it is run like a proper business.
Entrepreneurs are always thinking of ways to create wealth, and the big difference between this recession and the last one is that, this time, most of the young people who come to me for help are social entrepreneurs.
Some such as Patel are trying to save the planet or help people in the developing world. Others are building traditional commercial ventures to make money, but also have one eye on helping those less fortunate themselves.
Healthy Planet and other similar organisations demonstrate an appropriate and realistic way forward out of the recession.
Of course, the blame for our current misfortune lies with the greedy and the stupid; capitalism as an economic system does work better than any other, but no system is perfect and all models are prone to abuse.
Hopefully, the people in charge of the world’s economies will set up better regulation in future, but I am not holding my breath.
www.healthyplanet.org
mike@beermat.biz
More columns at www.ft.com/mikesouthon
