Making the decision to go back to education or to start a new business can be difficult at any time. However, if you’re thinking of the latter, it’s best to throw a bit of the former into the mix as well.

Many great ideas and businesses started in recessionary times and there is a general belief that more people will attempt to start their own businesses over the next year or so.

However, according to research, businesses set up by people who have done a start your own business course or an enterprise education course are more likely to still be in business a few years later.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2008 report on entrepreneurship in Ireland states that “participation in education or training in relation to entrepreneurship has positive effects on an individual’s preparedness and their likelihood of be coming an entrepreneur”.

In Ireland, there’s no excuse for not having this training/education – even if the over-55s account for just 3.5 per cent of start-ups, according to the GEM report. A few times a year, county and city enterprise boards hold 10-week courses in starting your own business. Many third-level institutions and VECs also provide these types of courses in their part-time adult education curriculum.

If you have an innovative idea that has job creation and export potential, and you want to take your education up a notch, there are about a dozen 12-month Enterprise Platform Programmes run in institutes of technology.

Brian O’Kane, managing director of Oak Tree Press, gives training and workshops for start-ups on a number of the Enterprise Platform Programmes and other courses. He also provides public courses such as a start-up boot camp. O’Kane has also run the Could You Be Your Own Boss? workshops for enterprise boards, which are for people in the pre-start-up stage and feed into the enterprise boards’ courses on starting your own business.

He says that the bulk of people starting businesses tend to be in their late 20s to early 40s. However, he believes that this is starting to change. “There is a move now more into the 50s and early 60s. People, certainly up to a year ago, were able to take early retirement and say ‘we have enough money, we don’t have to work for a living anymore and we now can do things we want to do’. I think you are going to find a new wave of people [doing this] if the Civil Service start retiring en masse and walking away with their pensions.”

According to O’Kane, people in this age group starting a business have the backing of their pension and a lump sum so they don’t have to make all of their living from the new business.

“One of the secrets of succeeding in start-ups is removing as much risk as possible and planning does that for you. If you’re at a point where you’re not dependent on the start-up for your breakfast tomorrow, that in itself removes an element of risk; whether or not it succeeds, you will continue to eat.”

The people who succeed, generally, are those who have done a lot of planning, he says. “A subset of planning, and what you must do, is market research,” he stresses. Not doing it could result in wasting a lot of time and money to find that people don’t want to buy the product/service, says O’Kane. Strategic planning is a vital and overlooked component to success, he believes.

Evidence of the role of education plays is shown in research from Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). It found that 67 per cent of entrepreneurs with enterprise education had prepared a strategic plan, compared with just 26 per cent of those without enterprise education.

If you want to capitalise on that great idea, then it’s time to get planning – planning which course you are going to sign up for.

Enterprise Platform Programmes

• South East Enterprise Platform Programme, Waterford Institute of Technology
• Novation Enterprise Platform Programme, Dundalk Institute of Technology
• Create Ireland, IADT Dún Laoghaire
• IT Carlow Enterprise Platform Programme
• M50 Enterprise Platform Programme in Dublin
• Limerick Enterprise Acceleration Platform, Limerick Institute of Technology
• Genesis Enterprise Programme, Cork Institute of Technology
• Hothouse, Dublin Institute of Technology
• Midlands & West Enterprise Programme, Athlone Institute of Technology
• Tralee Enterprise Platform Programme, Institute of Technology Tralee