Inspiring Young Minds

Emily Kerr, co-founder of Unlocked Guide Books for Kids

Charlie Astor and George Whitefield, Founders of Sharky & George, children's party organisers.

Joe Craig, Author of Jimmy Coates spy series for children 

Speakers field questions.

Our four young speakers came to a merry Burns Night consensus. Ask children what they think and start with the child in mind – value their imaginations; Don't make assumptions: don't try to be Mr. Giggles when kids prefer to talk to an older brother figure; don't assume that children aren't eating school dinners because of the food, or because school dinners aren't cool. No, they just don't like queuing and want to be first to the basket ball hoop outside. As for books, don't write for children based on the old priorities of character and setting: rather cater to children's short attention spans in another way...

Emily Kerr left her full time job at Bain and founded a publisher of guide books for children. Starting a very different sort of company, she did not abandon the principles learnt as a consultant: she and her childhood friend turned business partner took ingenious measures to understand their market. They asked the children what would make a good guide book. Bright colours and things to do (rather than to see) came the answers. And - most importantly - the books should be funny. Unlocked has gone one step further. They have a kids official board of directors, all younger than 12, all highly opinionated and insightful. When Unlocked considered commissioning 'Dinosaurs Unlocked', the board batted away the idea with iron logic: 'You can't visit dinosaurs'.

Charles Astor gets crowd involvedSharky and George's talk could hardly have been a better advert for their services. It is hard to imagine two more fun and grounded guys to lead a children's party. They were brilliant showmen and echoed Emily's point: start with the children. 'We are well aware

that this isn't a children's party' said Charlie Astor, before blowing a cloud of bubbles into the audience and challenging them to catch one on each finger. Later, an obliging lady was summoned up to fire a foot-propelled rocket into a helmeted Sharky's groin. Both activities were relished by a roomful of adults...'which illustrates a point...the youth of the mind is not defined by age'. So the pair don't try to be childish; they simply do what they enjoy and children join in; they're 'aiming for the older brother vibe'.

Their games are specifically 'about making a framework for [children] to use their imaginations', in contrast to computer games or television screens which supply a lot. So the idea is to 'feed' children the minimum. 'The more children invest in the game, the more they get out of it' says George. It's over to the children to make it work.

The speakers all dwelt on their business and working philosophies. They want to keep integrity despite the pressures of scaling. This is not unexpected given that all bar Joe are featured as heroes on the popular Escape the City website. The future for UnlockedGeorge Whitefield demonstrating an early prank Guides is to keep on asking the children, and keep on creating high-quality publications with top contributors. They are created with an eye to detail. For example, all the fun facts have been carefully written with the exciting, attention-grabbing part at the start. Emily's working arrangement has helped her remained focused on the product. She and her business partner spend 50% of their time on the business, and 50% doing other jobs. So they are able to keep cool heads when the long lead times in publishing mean there is little money coming in. Sharky and George are aiming to expand their brand in line with their philosophy. By their estimates, the company has entertained over 125,000 children over the last five years, so they are putting all of their tales into a book documenting the games. Many of those games they got from children, while a front-runner for the title of the book was given to them by a child: 'Books are Boring (apart from this one by Sharky & George)'.

Meanwhile, Joe Craig could have churned out many more books, but hasn't. In each of his books he has strived to correct the faults of the last one, which explains their huge following.

Joe was a confident and focused speaker, and his delivery had touches of accomplished stand-up comedy. He told his story. 'I am a very impatient reader. I have a short attention span [...] In my teens', he recollected 'I really stopped reading novels. I read a lot of non-fiction...sports books – by which I mean lists of cricket statistics [...] But I stopped reading fiction. And I thought that made me a non-reader.'

Joe began his professional life as a musician and it was only when he began writing 'as an academic exercise […] to see if I could write a story that would grab me, to see if I could come up with the formula for a perfect story', that Jimmy Coates was born. The rip-roaring formula he came up with had two parts.

Firstly, Joe emphasises structure and conflict over character and setting. Many writers prioritise the latter two and lose the attention of an impatient reader like Joe ('and all readers under 14 are like me'). Emphasising structure and conflict is more immediately engaging. Joe also teaches this when taking writing workshops for children.

Joe Craig spinning yarns

'Children are taught to write with character first. They are told to write down a bunch of habits and facts about a person. But that is hard work and ninety five percent of it won't make it into the story. Or you'll feel obliged to put it in because you've done all of the hard work.' Better to begin with the conflict - with the problem - and see how the character reacts to it. That way you get to know the character better too, by contemplating their response.

An intricate shaggy dog story illustrated Joe's second maxim. At the tale's incredible denouement, Joe was given seminal advice by one of the only authors he had read as a child. The old man was on death's row and could only write the words: 'Tell a story'.

Joe says his stories and their formula are written for himself and wonders what makes them for children (Anthony Horowitz, for example, writes with his teenage son in mind). Philosophical thoughts underpin much of what he writes and says. The twelve year old Jimmy Coates is pre-programmed to become a government assassin. But he doesn't. He fights his pre-determination. Readers of Jimmy Coates get an exciting introduction to the dilemna of free will.

Children should learn to tell stories, says Craig, because of their explanatory power (that Cambridge philosophy degree rears its head again). A single event, such as the economic crisis, does not have one single sufficient cause but many interwoven ones. To give a thorough explanation of the crash you need to bring in property bubbles, ratings agencies, banks, legislation and market speculation. Yet at secondary school children are disencouraged from telling complex stories and goaded towards singular, convergent answers – away from using their imagination. An event is the cause of another event depending on how it is described. So (quite literally), if children want to make head or tail of things, they should learn to tell a story.

Glowing ToMax fans grab interval haggis

Bathtub 2 Boardroom

In the context of starting a business, clearly, the Eureka moment is a myth. Everything has been done before. People have licked every frog. In Gogol's Dead Souls, the anti-hero collects the names of perished serfs and sells them – a crooked 19thC version of selling lists. As Simon Woodroffe quoted Felix Dennis:

'Ideas? We've had 'em, since Eve met Adam, but take it from me Execution's the key' 

So what advice from our speakers on how to clamber out of the tub and make it happen? 

Rob Symington, the co-founder of Escape the City, (whose eloquent appearance won him dozens of female admirers) formulated 'Five made-up rules for starting a business with little money and no relevant experience' (see http://blog.escapethecity.org/some-things-were-learning/).

The two most pertinent for me were to define success and to 'make meaning'. As to the former, it is easy to muck around doing things which are enjoyable or seem relevant, but do not contribute to long-term value. So, with ToMax Talks, for example, popularity is not success, however tempting a notion that might be. And, on the flip side, you can drown in a sea of urgent and important-seeming tasks - you can be swallowed up by chaos - if you haven't set out your goals properly. If you know your goals then you recognise your small victories. As Woodroffe put it, if you assimilate 1% each day, then by day 100 you have grasped 100%. But you have to know of what. 

Rob's other tip, to 'make meaning', is something Escape the City have done very effectively. They have a manifesto  (in short, they want people unfulfilled by their jobs to take back their lives) and Rob joked that his dad once asked if he was starting a cult. His point is that if your business is the sort people might bring up in a pub, then growing the brand is that much easier. 

Sarah Hilleary, who abandoned ship at Merill Lynch and started b-tempted, a Gluten-free cake company, perhaps gave the most nitty-gritty advice. She had clearly struggled at times, but come through it flyingly: the cakes are now sold in Fortnums and Masons and Harrods; those who managed to grab one of the brownies dotted around the room could taste why. She stressed the importance of seeking the advice of an expert in your field, and urged caution. Get the legal stuff right and identify how the business can be scaled at the outset. She also recommended having a contingency plan for when things go wrong: 'Last year...I fell off a wall!' she offered tentatively. 'I couldn't bake for months'.

Despite her sometimes shy manner, she has pulled some pretty bold and clever moves. She walked into Harrods with a tray of her cakes, and half an hour later she was upstairs feeding them to the regional buyer like a modern-day Circe. At one stage, she cunningly persuaded a patisserie to lend her kitchen-space by letting them sell her cakes. So don't be afraid to ask.

Simon Woodroffe, the founder of YO!Sushi, stood before us and expounded, extremely amusingly and with artful clownish touches, an unlikely mixture of stark ambition and Eastern philosophy. 

On the one hand, he explained, he had dreamt as a child of becoming a millionaire. His story was extraordinary (footage up on our site within the week); it involved him forgetting that childhood ambition for a couple of decades, during which he worked as a set designer for various rockstars, and ended with him concluding the deal to sell YO!Sushi. On his way home from that meeting, as he contemplated how life had changed, it dawned on him that this money would actually be in the cash machine. So he queued up to check (and got verification from the bloke behind him 'Take a cop at that mate!'). Brilliant.

Who wants to hear a modest entrepreneur!

On the other hand, his speech focused on the psychological aspects of setting out to start a business. How do you stay positive, how do you keep that 'impostor syndrome' away, the voice which says 'this could never work, you're a rookie'? Leave your comfort zone bit by bit, he recommended, and you will begin to have confidence. Your comfort-zone expands with each uncomfortable action, like the ripples in a pond. 

And once you are wholly focused and obsessed by your project, then things tend come right. 'At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you' he quoted from Goethe. In his case, during a visit to Japan, he serendipitously came into possession of a manual entitled 'Everything you need to know about starting your own conveyor-belt sushi restaurant'. In my eyes, Simon Woodroffe's most notable quality was his fecundity of ideas and the earnesty with which he treated even the most bizarre ones. He once gave serious thought to a YO! Funeral Company aimed at jazzing up that tired business. Unfortunately, the YO! Bars had already been christened 'YO!Below'. Perhaps the main thing is an enduring sense of fun. When a woman in the audience confessed to visiting YO!Below, he chastised her: 'you naughty girl!'