Start-up tips from the Scottish ‘dragon’

Entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne, who owns a casino, hotels and a health club chain, gives his top tips for start-up success.

Entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne, who owns a casino, hotels and health club chain Bannatyne Fitness, is one of five dragons', or judges, in the current BBC2 series Dragons' Den, in which aspiring entrepreneurs compete for funding for their business ideas. He grew up in a poor area of Glasgow and decided early on to make his fortune.

Bannatyne's first venture involved building up a fleet of ice cream vans in a bid to become king of the 99'. He then responded to a shortage of nursing homes by building one himself and developed successful businesses in healthcare and fitness. Writing in the Sunday Times, he offers the following tips on starting and running a business. They include:

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.