This year NHEHS entered The Tycoon Enterprise Competition for the first time with teams from Year 8 and Year 12. 

Tycoon is a national enterprise competition for students, Started by Peter Jones CBE in 2012,  as part of his campaign to encourage a start-up culture through encouraging and supporting enterprise education in the UK. Each team writes a business plan, is lent money, starts a business and trades, while competing with other student businesses from 200 schools and colleges through a kickstarter-style platform in a safe and controlled environment.

The competition is divided into four categories and there are also awards for Business for Good and for Innovation.

Here’s how one of our Year 12 teams, Scrapbuds achieved a fantastic result with their beeswax wraps and decorations made with scrap material and rings:

By Isabel Hepburne-Scott, Li An Tan, Dulcie Johnson

We borrowed £40 and have made a profit of £947.

We felt really strongly that the thing that was integral to our small business was the fact that the products were homemade. We honed in on the fact that the unique factor about our product and overall our general experience, was our time and commitment. What we also felt was important was that there was a need for our product as we wanted to sell something that helped people be more environmentally friendly and reduce their carbon footprint in a fun and accessible way. Our beeswax wraps allow people to reduce food waste and plastic usage in a new easy way. We made our wraps out of scraps which we sourced from material shops and people’s donations in order to utilise leftover material that would not otherwise be used. We also used plastic free packaging to ensure that our wraps were completely carbon neutral. 

The fact that our product is inexpensive to make, but requires time and skill, allowed us to be able to borrow a small loan and make a huge profit from it. We only borrowed what we needed which meant we have made a huge return on investment of 2,255%. We researched how much we could sell our wraps for and ensured we sold them for competitive prices. We also sought financial expertise who encouraged us to keep a spreadsheet recording the amount of each product and how many sales we had. 

We have used Instagram to help market our product as well as creating a website. This has allowed us to communicate with a wider community very easily and efficiently. This has been especially advantageous when displaying videos, as posters cannot always illustrate the uses of beeswax wraps as well. We have uploaded many videos of how to use beeswax wraps in different ways which allows people to see the range of uses of the product. We have also used our digital skills to create spreadsheets to show how much money we are making and to manage our stock.

We all had different roles within the group which meant that we had different responsibilities. This allowed each of us to focus on one area and make sure that it was the best it could be, whether that was the product itself, the social media, or the marketing element. This really motivated us as we were very organised and knew what we had to do and work on to make a higher profit.