The Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust (PSYBT) can be proud of its track record as it celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. To date, it has assisted more than 10,500 young people to start 8,673 businesses and 82 per cent of those have traded beyond one year. Among those are Matt McGrath's Aircraft Medical and Jen Munro's International Summer School of Scotland.

McGrath, whose company designs and manufactures medical devices including the McGrath Laryngoscope, received a PSYBT £25,000 accelerator loan in 2003. Today, his company is worth around £25m.

Munro also received funding from the charity, but insists it was the "genuine interest" in her business (a summer camp that combines academic and leisure pursuits based at the halls of residence at the University of St Andrews) that helped: "Somebody else believed in my business, it wasn't just my mum and dad." Her £1.2m turnover business is debt-free and profitable.

The two firms have tremendous growth potential and both have international appeal. McGrath says it took a long time to build a management team and network of experts to assist him in financial, legal, regulatory, technological and intellectual property areas. Now that he has that team, he has "more time than ever before" to develop opportunities. "You can compete in any market if you're willing to go further than your competitors. By trying harder, designing products that look and work better, and making big or small improvements," he says. "Where people encounter new problems, find new solutions."

Munro says her sales are up 100 per cent on last year. Starting from an "absolutely blank sheet of paper", with nothing comparable in the UK to benchmark herself against, she will open a school in North Carolina in the US this year and is putting Scottish education on the map, as 80 per cent of her students [most of whom are from mainland Europe] are now applying to a Scottish university.

"In the next few years, if we had 30 students at a Scottish university, that would add about £20m to the Scottish economy," she says. Her USP? "We offer a balanced programme and a fun atmosphere where kids feel safe. Our electives are taught to just as high a standard as our academics. And we have kids from over 46 nationalities per session [of 150 kids]. It opens up their world."