Money. it sometimes seems as though our world revolves around it, the human race probably does revolve around it but how can someone make it?

Many people have their rags to riches stories; Lord Alan Sugar, Duncan Bannatyne, and Sir Richard Branson. But how did they do it? What is the secret to money success. Spending it.

Yes, you have to spend your hard earned cash before you can make more, seems crazy but it works.

In a recent Discovering Mathematics workshop, the MA2 student teachers were given an Apprentice-style task- demand planning. We split into pairs and were (theoretically) given £5000. We had to use this money to plan what we thought would sell in a shop at different times of the year and buy it accordingly in order to make the biggest profit.

Katy and I decided to work strategically, we thought we would only spend a couple of hundred pounds and save the rest ‘just in case’. We spent roughly £300 on stock for the first three months and made a profit of £900- great! We decided to stick with this tactic of spending a little and making, what we thought, was a great a profit.

At the end of the task we had £10,000 meaning we had made a profit of £5000 over the year, doubling our original sum of money!

We thought we had done brilliantly until other people started reading out their profits. Other pairs had made hundreds of thousands of pounds and how had they done it? They spent thousands of pounds on items such as tins of beans in the first three months of the task. They had managed to make more money because they were spending more money and therefore had more stock for people to buy.

So. if you’re thinking of quitting the day job to start a business, maybe start saving so that when you’re ready, you can start spending!