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Pizza Pioneer Shares Start-up Experiences in Edinburgh

Pizza pioneer Donnie Mclean is to join business expert and best-selling business author Emma Jones for the first ever StartUp Saturday to be held in Edinburgh, later this month.

Donnie Mclean set up revolutionary healthy pizza company Eat Balanced when he decided to look into why ready-made pizzas were so unhealthy – and then do something about it.

His pioneering work took the industry-standard high-salt, high saturated fat, low nutrient offering and challenged it head-on. His range of pizzas contain much lower levels of saturated fat and sodium, and more fibre and nutritional content.

Glasgow-born and University of Strathclyde Business School educated, Donnie went to London to work with an insurance firm before returning to his home country – and his entrepreneurial roots.

He launched his range of pizzas into supermarkets last year with the help of Edinburgh-based incubator Entrepreneurial Spark. He is now working on his next project – nutritionally-balanced curries.

Emma Jones, Enterprise Nation founder and StartUp Britain co-founder, says start-ups and micro businesses hold the key to turning around the flagging British economy. Her visit will be focused on helping city-based entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses.

According to official labour market statistics, more than 32,400 people in Edinburgh are creating their own value by working for themselves – that’s 8.5% of the working population, ahead of the Scottish national average.

According to Business Gateway, an initiative run by the City of Edinburgh Council, incorporations in the city in the three months to April 2013 were up two per cent on the same period in 2012. The scheme supported 209 start-ups in March - double that recorded in February.

Emma said: “I’m heading to Edinburgh to get as many people as possible to take that first step to start a business. As I travel around the UK, I am seeing amazing stories about how people are turning something they love doing into a business that brings in money.

“You don’t need an office or a filing cabinet or any of the trappings that used to be associated with starting-up. You just need passion, an idea, commitment – and the confidence to get out there and do it.

“It’s taking the first step that is the biggest leap. That’s partly what StartUp Saturday is designed to help with.

“I want to see people in Edinburgh who would like to take their passion, hobby, skill or who have spotted a gap in the market and want to know how to turn it into a great business in a day.”

Emma, who was awarded an MBE for services to enterprise in the Queen’s Jubilee Birthday Honours List, will be encouraging people in the city to turn a hobby or a passion into a money-spinning idea at the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge on Saturday October 26, the fourth event on a whistle-stop tour of the UK.

Hear how Donnie challenged the food industry’s mantra that pizza is junk food and find out how he went about setting up his business from scratch using his own savings and investment from his mum and dad.

Book a ticket here

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Enterprise Nation .