UNDER THIRTY? HAVE a great business idea or a burgeoning SME?

The Government – honestly – are looking to give you a hand. There is just a week left (closing date 31 July) to enter the Ireland’s Best Young Entrepreneur competition.

The top prize is a €100,000 to help you develop your business – but there are also 62 grants of €20,000 and 31 grants of €10,000 available – a total of €1.55m to be shared among 93 entrepreneurs.

Each of the finalists will also get a management bootcamp and mentoring support as part of the overall €2m fund.

There is also a decent spread of categories at each county stage:

• Best new idea
• Best start-up business (under 18 months)
• Best established business with new add-on (over 18 months)
• Best young entrepreneur (for each county, as well as the overall winner)

Obviously, this is all part of the Government’s oft-stated ‘get the country back to work’ overarching target but it is also influenced by an entrepreneurship monitor report for Ireland from last year. That report, published in June and which can be read in full here, found that 39% of Irish entrepreneurs were aged between 18 and 24 years.

What happens in the early stages of entrepreneurial activity is really important to providing a “firm birth” (the report author’s words, not ours!) to a nascent company.

If you are under 30 years of age, and think you have an idea or business that could do with this kind of help, see the competition criteria here.

An interesting aside: the judges want people to sex up their applications with a video pitch and give some tips on how to do that. They recommend having a look at this ‘elevator pitch’ video:

What do you think of it?

And good luck!

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