Cherry Professional

As an introduction can you give us a potted history on you and how you became involved with Young Enterprise please?
After a 35 year career with Barclays bank which I enjoyed very much I realised that I wanted a change in life. I had always enjoyed working with young people and so bringing together my business experience the opportunity to work with Young Enterprise was one that I couldn't miss. Young Enterprise brings business and enterprise into schools so it seemed to match exactly what I wanted to do at that stage in my life.

What is the purpose of Young Enterprise as you see it?
Young Enterprise is an educational charity and its purpose has recently been redefined as building a connected world of young people, business volunteers and educational people and inspiring each other to succeed through enterprise.

What does a typical week look like for you?
In a typical week I would hope to be spending at least a couple of days in schools actually interacting with the young people of any year group - we have programmes that are suitable for any individual year group. The rest of the week would be involved with finding new schools to visit and also organising events relating to the company programme which Young Enterprise runs in the county.

Cherry Professional, we are very proud to be supporting Young Enterprise in the East Midlands, how do you develop relationships with other businesses, what is your marketing strategy?
Young Enterprise is keen to work with any business, one way we can look at that is through examining a company's corporate social responsibility policy to see if what we are offering to schools fits with what they aim to do. We can then go and see the company and discuss with them what measure of support they might be able to give - that support can be their staff volunteering to help with their time, perhaps the company can provide some financial support for the activities or maybe the company can provide facilities such as meeting rooms and venues for various events.

Young people continue to get a bad press, what are some of the challenges you face when working with young people?
Well first and foremost I think that bad press for young people is out of proportion and the young people of today are not I believe any different from any previous generation. Most of them want to be successful and happy in their lives, having said that clearly in some school s there are discipline challenges and there is a lack of aspiration I think among a lot of our young people which is where Young Enterprise can come in and challenge them to take personal responsibility for their lives and realise their true potential.

What do you do outside of work / what makes you tick?
I'm married with one son. I've always enjoyed watching sport because I have never been particularly adept at any one sport. I enjoy travel and skiing in particular. I am off skiing next week in Switzerland and will actually be spending a bit of time with my son who is out there at the moment and he is a qualified ski instructor so I should be able to brush up on my technique!

Is there anything else you'd like to tell us or comment on?
I just think that the work that Young Enterprise does is incredibly important at the current time. Not long ago there were a million people unemployed and now there are a million people aged 18-24 unemployed and employers may feel that students leaving school at the moment lack a lot of the skills they are looking for. They may have the qualifications on paper but skills such as communication, team working, creativity are things students are lacking and I think it's those particular skills that Young Enterprise can help bring out in students and therefore make a difference to their future lives.

I think you mentioned previously to me about how schools are judged on academic performance but this is something different, does that present a challenge when promoting Young Enterprise with schools?
I think for schools because there is such an emphasis on exam results there is a challenge in getting them to take on Young Enterprise programmes which might be seen as a nice to have rather than a need to have and that's something that hopefully with the help of local business people we can change.