‘I’m very pleased,’ said Ravi, then 22, who had just bought himself a three-storey £500,000 penthouse in London Fields, near Dalston. Ravi’s first business venture was hiring a nightclub for a party.
He earned £3,000 and never looked back – despite getting regular detentions at school for making business calls on his mobile during lessons. “My economics teacher kept chucking me out,” he said. “I spent most of my time outside the classroom instead of inside it.”
He left school at 16 and headed straight for Ayia Napa, where he began promoting club nights before MTV talent spotted him and awarded him a contract to run its teenage parties.
And he has no regrets about cutting short his education. He said: ‘I left school at 16 but most people are like sheep – they go to university because their teachers advise them to, based on their own experience 30 years before.
‘But university doesn’t mean as much as it used to and huge numbers of people are dropping out now. What you need is practical experience in the workplace so we encourage people to do work experience while they are at school, then get a job.’
After returning to the UK, Ravi set up another firm, OneOffice, which offers internet office services to small and medium-sized companies.
It has built up 2,000 clients in less than a year and will open a New York office this summer. The business means that Ravi is now able to help other young entrepreneurs.
Ravi fervently believes that other young people can follow his lead.
“It’s not difficult to make a million pounds out of a business,” he said. “As long as you’re dedicated and persistent, it’s very achievable.”
Ravi takes a pragmatic view on the value of money. “It becomes meaningless,” he said. “It just becomes a by-product. Money always means much more to those who don’t have it than to those that do.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment