Boys Learn from Recent Leaver Entrepreneur

Year 10 and Year 11 boys at Bolton School enjoyed the first of this year’s World of Work career presentations when recent leaver Jayden Patel (Class of 2015) returned to talk to them during their morning assembly. Jayden told them how he had been part of the first Sixth Form year group to move into the newly built Riley Sixth Form Centre and how one of his A levels had been Business Studies and that, ironically given he studied it at university, the subject he liked least within the qualification was Accounting. Jayden told how he had started an Accountancy degree at the University of Nottingham but, after two years, had decided it was not for him and that he wanted to become an entrepreneur. He described how he switched across to study Accounting and Business which he much preferred as it offered him more interesting electives. His course of study involved a year out in business and he recalled how he enjoyed working at Brown Shipley, a private bank in Manchester. 

After graduation, Jayden recalled how he first worked for Hewlett Packard as an Account Manager – where he learnt important sales skills. He then went on to work for a health start-up company, which he said was chaotic but taught him some important lessons and then, in 2021, he founded his own tech start-up called Aquaint, which he now runs as CEO. The business includes an app that helps restaurants manage operations through checklists, temperature monitoring, allergen controls and communication with the team. 

Considering a career as an entrepreneur, Jayden said the key skills were the desire to keep learning and patience. It is not enough, he said, to be just in it for the money – you have to have a passion for it too. He also explained how it is a good idea to surround yourself with people that are smarter than yourself. He revealed how his company is in the build, measure, learn feedback loop, how he attends lots of networking events and finds LinkedIn to be very useful. In terms of funding, he said this can come from family and friends, from angels and also from venture capitalists. Entrepreneurs, he said, often aim to scale up and sell their business for profit, the average timeframe for this being seven years. 

Jayden then answered a number of questions, which included why did you choose to become involved with restaurants and how did mentors help you? 

You can watch Jayden’s talk again in full through this link.