Video: Dragons' Den Doug Richard dispenses business advice to Yorkshire entrepreneurs

The former Dragons' Den panellist has chosen the city's MADE Entrepreneur Festival to launch his two-day programme, which aims to transform the way that small businesses exploit the power of the internet.

The programme, called MADE in 48 Hours, will be studied by Business Minister Mark Prisk, who is attending the festival with colleagues from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Mr Richard has been an outspoken critic of Business Link, the taxpayer-funded support service, and wrote a report for the Conservatives in 2008 on the future of business support in the UK.

He told the Yorkshire Post that no one programme could replace what Business Link tried to do – however unsuccessfully – but his scheme could provide an "exemplar for specific expertise-based training to help small businesses become more efficient, particularly in the use of the internet".

He said most small businesses in Britain fail to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the internet and in most cases only manage an online brochure for their goods or services.

MADE in 48 Hours will help them gain a greater understanding of how to market their businesses online through free and paid-for search engine optimisation, which can help accelerate growth, Mr Richard added.

"It's astonishing how little time and effort it takes to get good at this stuff and become a more successful business," he said.

O2, the telecommunications giant, is setting up superfast broadband for Mr Richard's two-day programme, which costs 375 per ticket. "I'm charging less than the cost of putting it on," he added.

The rest of the MADE festival is free, which runs from September 8-11, and includes the launch of the Sheffield National Enterprise Academy by Peter Jones, the Dragons Den panellist,and the TEDx Sheffield event, hosted by North East-based digital entrepreneur Herb Kim.

Rachel Bridge, the business writer, will be performing her show on How to Make a Million Before Lunch, which is currently playing at the Edinburgh fringe festival.

Ms Bridge said the show – the title of her new book – reveals the shortcuts to business success, as gleaned from her interviews with hundreds of successful entrepreneurs. "There are lots of things that people think they need to be doing, like getting a bank loan, employing people or getting a shop. I say don't do that.

"I cut through the unnecessary stuff that people do and give people a better chance of success and ensuring they get there quicker," she said.

Ms Bridge said successful entrepreneurs tend to share one main characteristic – passion. "There's no place to be half-hearted about these things," she added. "You have got to put your heart and soul in it and really do it like you mean it."

For more details, visit www.madefestival.com and www.madein48hours.co.uk

Mentoring a vital ingredient

Expertise and mentoring are vital to small businesses, said Doug Richard.

"They need expertise to help them because they cannot hire all the people a large business can" said the serial entrepreneur. "They need mentoring. Most smaller businesses die because they make a bad judgment. The best thing is to have somebody as a sounding board to bounce ideas off."

He said senior business people do not provide enough mentoring for young businesses. "There's not enough payback," he said.

In the Richard Report, written for the Tories in opposition, Mr Richard questioned the annual 2.5bn cost of business support, much of which was lost in administrative costs.

He said that the role for government should be to

provide "extraordinary" amounts of information to help small businesses navigate through bureaucracy.

"If they did just that, they would be doing a far better job than they do today," he said.