Are The Beatles the UK's most successful entrepreneurs?

Quite a bold headline for a news piece – but this is the view of ‘Beermat Entrepreneur’ author Mike Southon.

Mike is going to present ‘Something about The Beatles’ at the Hilton London Metropole Hotel early next month. He says the idea for his latest presentation was inspired by the BBC’s Dragon’s Den programme:

I cannot stand the programme.” says Mike. “I regard it as a grotesque parody, as much to do with entrepreneurship as Pop Idol has to do with The Beatles.”

Mike began to think about The Beatles’ career, and realised they were a great example of successful British entrepreneurship:

“The Beatles started their business for the right reasons: not just to make money, but because they were passionate about what they did. They had a great Elevator Pitch: ‘like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, only British’. They found a Mentor, their manager Brian Epstein, who put them in suits and pitched them to record companies. They suffered rejection along the way, famously being turned down by Decca, but eventually found a First Customer, producer George Martin, who signed them to EMI.”

“They were clearly in the right place at the right time, a pattern I have seen in every successful entrepreneur I have ever interviewed. Specifically, they played on the Ed Sullivan Show in New York on 9th February 1964; Sir Paul McCartney counted in All My Loving and 73 million people immediately got the point.”

In his presentation Mike will describe how, like all successful entrepreneurs, The Beatles had challenges and conflicts along the way but created considerable wealth for themselves and many others and left a stunning legacy.

“Other entrepreneurs may have made more money and sold more products, but I contend that The Beatles were the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs ever, measured by the number of hearts that they touched and lives that they changed.”

Mike is co-founder of www.beermat.biz, a web site which provides resources for start-ups based on his best-selling books, which include The Beermat Entrepreneur and Sales on a Beermat. He will be presenting Something about the Beatles at 1900 on Monday 4th August at the Hilton London Metropole Hotel, London, W2 1JU