On Wednesday we attended a talk given by the extremely personable, Giovanni Benedetti CBE. He is a successful entrepreneur buying up failing businesses and turning them around. He is on the panel of The Prince’s Youth Business Trust and is the father of Nicola Benedetti, the highly talented violinist.
To give you a wee summary, he arrived in Scotland aged 10 in the early 1950s to work in his uncle’s cafe. Inspired to own a nice car but only earning £2 a week he became acutely aware that this would not happen. So at 17 he bought a dry cleaning shop that was not performing very well. Knowing nothing about the dry cleaning business, the owner promised to help him get started but disappeared out of the picture soon afterwards. It is quite a testament that he grew the business into a 27 shop dry cleaning chain before selling it!
What was clear from his talk is that there are opportunities all around, you just have to look for them. One of these opportunities presented when he found that leather gloves used for cleaning cars in the large car factories were disposed of after use. So he set about creating a machine capable of cleaning these leather gloves. Once successful he sold that business and moved on. What I liked best was the cling film and tin foil products which he turned around. Gone are the days of ripping cling film and tin foil from a serrated cardboard box. A simple re-design and hey-presto a more efficient delivery system. Even the boring first aid kit (small square green box, open it up and everything falls out). Re-design the traditional packaging, colour, shape and keep everything in place and you have a successful replacement for a product which has been on the market for years.
In concluding his talk with a question and answer session, Mr Benedetti acknowledged that even his daughter is an entrepreneur! Judging by recent media, we tend to view “entrepreneurs” as business types only. Yet the reality is a type of personality willing to take upon themselves a new venture and accept full responsibility for the outcome, whatever it may be. Alone but rarely acknowledged are all the artistically creative individuals out there who are all entrepreneurs too!
