Walk into most college enterprise programmes and you'll find them quietly organised around a fantasy: that somewhere in the room is the next founder - the business success story; the showcase business; the pitch competition winner; the case study for the prospectus.
The truth is that most learners will never start a business, let alone a company. And they shouldn't. But every single one of them will need the things enterprise teaches: backing your own judgement, making a decision without full information, recovering when something doesn't work, speaking up for an idea. These are all employability skills - and life skills.
Once you stop measuring a programme by how many businesses it spawns, the quality of the relationships you build with your learners improves - because it becomes about them. This carries significant value and creates strong advocates for your offer.
Enterprise is the vehicle. The person is the destination.
You can teach a midwifery learner to think entrepreneurially about a problem on a ward without asking them to register a company.
I've watched programmes die because they were judged on the wrong metric: business startups - when they should have been judged on what changed in the learner. The ones that work decouple the two early. They use real venture attempts because nothing else generates the same pressure or exposure, but they're honest that the attempt is the point, not the outcome.
Stop hunting for unicorns. Build the programme for those who will never start a business, and make them more capable through the process. The founder, if there is one, comes out of that anyway.