Starting the company up from scratch Dotsquares CEO Bankim Chandra is fully aware of the everyday struggles young entrepreneurs face. As a way to give back to the community, a decade ago Bankim signed up to be a mentor on the Young Enterprise Program. The organisation is a financial education charity, empowering young people to enhance their skills and knowledge, to enable them to succeed in their careers and throughout their life.

Based in Brighton and having strong connections with Brighton College, mentorship for the school was an obvious choice. Bankim is one of the many business minds in Sussex, which voluntarily lends his time to guide these students on making certain business decisions. Every year candidates on the programme divide into groups and come up with a business plan for a product our service.

This year the team that was under Bankim’s mentorship, The Dining Card Group’, created a concept that would allow fine-dining consumers to receive discounts at certain restaurants in the City. The idea would mean that each restaurant would provide a free main course, for every two main courses ordered, to maximise the customer satisfaction. The Ginger Man group are one chain of restaurants that are on board with The Dining Card Group, and there are still negotiations underway with other restaurants like The Salt Rooms.

At the end of every year the local areas are brought together to be judged against one another at a semi-final, and this year the semi-finals where held at the AMEX in Brighton. Each Young Enterprise company had to make a presentation about their product and learnings, and then the judges scored them in the following areas:

• Communication
• Administration
• Marketing & Sales
• Financial systems & results
• Objective setting / planning & review
• Problem solving
• Team Work
• Product development
• Skills & Understanding
• Innovation & entrepreneurship!

After the scores have been tallied the teams are announced in order of lowest score to the highest, and the winners and runners up go through to the finals which are hosted later this week. To our excitement Bankim and his team have made it through to the finals with their exclusive dining experience, and we wish them all the best heading into the finals.