Laura Burgess found herself at something of a loose end when she left university in 2004 with a degree in French and Russian. “I’d been so immersed in studying for four years that I had not given my career plan a lot of thought,” she says.

In the end Burgess, the founder of ecoescape, a green travel guide, joined a marketing partnership that promoted Nottingham as a tourist destination. Despite working full-time there, and later at a regional tourism board, she was also developing her own business idea. “Part of my job was taking journalists to various places around the East Midlands, including an ecolodge in Lincolnshire. I thought that the lodge was a good idea and that there must be more examples of sustainable tourism in the UK.” There are; she found them and began writing a book about them.

By the end of 2006, she realised that her book and fledgeling travel guide business needed her full attention, so she left her job. She had won a £5,000 “Big Boost” award – a scheme that was supported by the National Lottery but is now closed – for young social entrepreneurs six months earlier. She also raised several thousand pounds by selling advertising. The money helped with the costs of printing and distributing the book, but other assistance came in the form of advice. “I was assigned a manager with the Big Boost who was my port of call for support,” she says.

The award helped her to launch her book very successfully – so successfully, in fact, that she nearly turned down the opportunity to attend the Summer Academy last year. “I was in the middle of promoting my book and taking a week out felt like quite a long time, but I was also at a point where I needed some human contact because I work so much on my own,” she says.

It was this need for social interaction that persuaded her to attend the academy, a week-long residential session run in association with ?What If!, an innovation company, for the top 20 entrepreneurs supported by the Big Boost. “It was a break from my normal everyday life. There was so much variety that it really injected me with enthusiasm.” In retrospect, Burgess is intensely grateful for the academy. It came along at a time when business life was grinding her down and she was finding it hard to maintain her entrepreneurial momentum. “I had worked so hard to get that first book out but I needed a real way of just keeping going,” she says.

“A lot of the week was spent talking about innovation, creativity and how to keep our ideas flowing ... the biggest thing I got out of it was interaction with people I would not otherwise have met. It [showed] me that I wasn’t alone and it was a way of seeing that although things can be difficult you can work it out.”

After the week her confidence was so much higher that she approached a publisher and secured a two-book deal that gives her books a much higher profile than she could achieve through self-publishing.

She wasn’t the only one inspired by the scheme; at the end of the week all the participants got together and set up the Commission for Youth Social Enterprise, which advises government and businesses about working with young entrepreneurs. “We wanted to continue this work because we felt it was really important. We all had our own individual goals but we wanted to have an impact together as well.”
www.ecoescape.org

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