St Mary's Welcome Gandys FlipFlops to Speak to Students on Developing a Business

Co-founder of Gandys FlipFlops Paul Forkan spoke to students at St Mary’s University, Twickenham at the start of March on his business journey From Rags to Riches. Gandys FlipFlops are a leading FlipFlop brand in the UK and are quickly developing into a well known clothing brand for young travellers. Paul and his brother Rob founded the company after his family were tragically struck by the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 whilst travelling. The brother's other siblings survived, but sadly their parents did not. This experience inspired the young brothers to generate money to build an orphanage in India where children would be provided with education. This is known as the Gandys Foundation, an additional dimension to the brothers company. Paul spoke about the importance of the Gandys brand, and mentioned the sentiment of the design, which incorporated an image representing his Father's favourite beer. He explained the company's values, where he repeatedly used the phrase “doing good for others”. Paul told students about the struggles and challenge of setting up a business, and described it as similar to "getting in a ring with Mike Tyson". Despite this, the company has over 10,000 followers on Twitter and their efforts have been acknowledged by the Royal Family and Sir Richard Branson, among others. The lecture was arranged as part of the BA Physical and Sport Education (PSE) programme's module in Leadership, Management and Legislation in Sport where the assessment is to write a business plan. PSE Lecturer and Module Convenor Amy Price said, “I feel it is important for students to have a sense of reality in this module because business models and strategies can sometimes be alien to many people who have never studied this field before.” In order to provide a further sense of reality to learning, the curriculum is designed using a games-based approach, whereby all students are acting as both entrepreneurs and investors throughout the module. This is achieved by using a prize of real money to fund a start up. The seminars use The Apprentice style tasks, relevant to the theoretical ideas being learnt each week. Students who perform particularly well in tasks accumulate pretend investment from staff, and from their fellow classmates. The two students with the most investment at the end of the module will pitch their idea to an audience of speakers from business and to the rest of the class for a chance to win the real money, which will be placed in their business account. The winner will also receive 12 months support from a business mentor sourced by from University's Enterprise Society and Coaching Centre. Amy explains "I wanted the curriculum to empower students to get a real life feel for business. Having people from business explaining their journey is helping this. The game based curriculum meant that the students were encouraged to think like an entrepreneur, and an investor. This would hopefully help them to strategically reflect on themselves and their business idea. “We have used the business plan template written by The Princes Trust for the assessment; I'm hoping this will mean students who wish to pursue their business can quite literally submit this whenever they want to the Trust. The aim is for the winner, who gains the real money worth £500 sourced from The University's Coaching Centre, will eventually create some revenue to grow the Coaching Centre further. The whole idea is to engage the students through an authentic experience and provide them with a genuine opportunity to enhance their career prospects."