It’s very easy to sit at the starting position of having an idea and there are a number of problems at the beginning. If you’ve got a reasonably halfway decent job that you don’t actually hate, why would you go and do something that’s high risk?

I think you’ve got to be driven to want to do it and I think there’s a kind of natural reaction that stops people from doing scary things. Most people sit at the very beginning of an idea and wonder if they should do it or not, but you can do something in parallel to what you’re already doing.

Get rid of your TV set, cut down on your social life, don’t have a girlfriend, spend less money: do whatever it is that means you have more time to put into researching and developing your idea. But don’t decide whether you’re going to do it or not at the beginning. Just say you’re going to put the time and research in and be willing to write off that amount of time and money if it doesn’t work.

When I set up YO! Sushi I said I wouldn’t decide for three months whether I would commit to it but within that period I’d try and do as much research as I could and get a 1% improvement every day. At the end of three months I’d have a 100% improvement and then I’d make the decision.

But I never met anybody who went out and did what they wanted to do and then regretted it, regardless of whether or not they were successful. I saw a very typical American survey of 1,000 old people – the ultimate exit interview – asking them what they would have done differently in their life. And nearly to a tee they said they would have spent a little less time worrying about their own financial security and hedging their bets and a little bit more on living out their dreams.

I think you have to have quite a strong self-belief, be quite confident and resilient to be an entrepreneur. You’ve got to have a lot of personal drive.

Every start-up business is like a child: whenever it cries it needs attention. You’ve got to be of the mind that says I’ll do whatever it takes, and you’ve got to be in a position to do whatever it takes.

People with other commitments who aren’t in a position to give everything up and say ‘that’s going to be my absolute number one priority until it’s got a life of its own’ aren’t going to succeed. Once it’s a grown-up and it starts getting its own perpetual motion, that’s fine but I think that those qualities in the early stages are what makes a business survive or fail.

There are so many failures in those first months and I’ve got a suspicion that that’s because they’re non-entrepreneurial people who don’t understand what they have to do, and haven’t got the resilience and commitment and time to make a business work.

think the secret is to do it. A lot of people just don’t try and do other things in their life instead and they could have become great entrepreneurs if they tried. I think almost anybody who goes into entrepreneurship will succeed.

You have to find a product and you have to market that product, whether it’s a service or something you’re selling. Mine’s always been the service industry but, whatever the product is, find a gap and just go for it.

I’ve met quite a lot of start-up companies and it’s amazing the things you find. There was this café I went to run by a lady and her daughter and neither of them really wanted to make any money. They just wanted to be in business and have that lifestyle and that’s the wrong reason to do it.

They were too small to expand or have any scalability. It wasn’t possible to scale up and have 10 outlets. If you can’t make ends meet when you’re working in the shop, then you can’t afford to employ someone to work in the shop when you open a second one. So there’s a lot of people who don’t really have any ambition to expand. They just go into business because they want to.

If you’ve made your money and you want to invest then obviously you’ve got to know when to invest. If I invest money now it’s because I want to be involved and get some excitement out of it.

With the people we see on Dragons’ Den, the cardinal sins are not knowing your product, not doing your research and not having the answers. We’re sitting there totally blind to what the proposal is so if we can pick things up and they haven’t thought them through, then it’s curtains because these people are living with it.

The other sad thing is that people ask relatives and friends what they think of their idea, and they’re not the best people. They’ll always say nice things to you. So people come in and say ‘everyone I’ve spoken to says’ but everyone they’ve spoken to is their family and friends.

But I think it was Napoleon who said we’re a nation of shopkeepers, and what’s a shopkeeper? A small-business man. Shopkeeping was the simplest business for a businessman and it’s changed now with technology and life’s moved on.

But that’s what the ethos is in this country. A lot of people have it inside them to run their own business. But they have to focus on every single decision of that business and the way it’s going across the whole business.

The single most important thing is cashflow and you’ve got to plan for that. I’ve often said a lack of profits is like a cancer, it kills you off very slowly. But a lack of cashflow is like a heart attack because you can’t pay your bills, the bank moves in and you’re bust. And that’s where you’ve got to see further: if I do this what are the consequences?

Everything will go wrong at some stage; it’s how you deal with that and plan for it that matters.