TV shows like The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den may be putting young people off setting up their own companies by portraying a caricature of business life, one of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs has warned.
Luke Johnson, best known for his expansion of the Pizza Express restaurant chain and former chairmanship of Channel 4, called on the media to portray entrepreneurs in a more “positive and optimistic” fashion.
Three-quarters of small business owners taking part in a survey for Mr Johnson’s new Centre for Entrepreneurs (CfE) were critical of the TV business shows. CfE aims to provide a voice for small businesses and promote debate on reforming regulation and the finance system to encourage start-ups.
Mr Johnson, now chairman of private equity firm Risk Capital Partners, said: “I think we need to educate the media and politicians and the public that entrepreneurs really matter.
“They create an awful lot of the new jobs and are disproportionately important in innovation.
“We want to understand them more, we want to encourage more of them and we want to help them.
“Unfortunately, in our survey about 75% of entrepreneurs we talked to said they thought the shows portrayed entrepreneurs in a caricatured way and I think that’s unfortunate, because it can be off-putting and it discourages.
“Ideally what we should be doing is inspiring more young people to start a business, or indeed people of any age, to help create growth.”
He added: “We need to help change the culture over time and that means portraying the more positive, optimistic side of entrepreneurship.”
Mr Johnson said the CfE would be “a voice to help counteract the big business voice” of organisations such as the CBI.
“We are going to represent the smaller, newer businesses which are a big proportion of the private sector in the UK,” he added.
Dragons’ Den host Evan Davis said: “I hear the criticisms but it (the show) does excite young people.
“It does make them think about entrepreneurship in a way that they perhaps didn’t when I was at school.”