What was the name of Peter Jones's first business, launched when he was 16?

Peter Jones’s first business, launched when he was 16, was a tennis academy.

Jones developed an interest in business at a young age and set up the tennis academy while still a teenager. The venture gave him early experience in organising services, finding customers and managing a commercial operation before his later work in technology, communications and investment.

He subsequently built a varied portfolio of businesses and became one of the original UK Dragons when the programme began. His career has included interests in mobile communications, consumer technology, property and media.

The answer is often incorrectly given as one of Jones’s later technology companies because those businesses are more prominent in accounts of his adult career. The tennis academy was an early entrepreneurial project, not a mobile-phone retailer, computer shop or record label. It illustrates that his business career began before his best-known investments.