Alex Turner is the general manager of financial training firm Ambitious Minds.

DESPITE the bursting of the dotcom bubble a decade ago, and the spiralling debts of football clubs, it seems that the internet and sport remain immune to the ordinary rules of business.

Yet that does not stop leading figures achieving a prominence that their organisation’s profit and loss just don’t deserve.

Yet Royal Bank of Scotland’s magazine, Business Sense – full of such insights like consider Ireland and France when looking to expand overseas – is guilty of exactly that.

The latest edition has interviews with Karren Brady, famous for being a female running a football club, and the co-founder of online retailer Ocado, Jason Gissing.

Ms Brady is now at the helm at West Ham United, but spent 16 years as managing director of Birmingham City before leaving just after the end of the 2009 financial year. In the last 10 years, five years of profit and five years of loss resulted in the business making aggregate pre-tax losses of £20m on turnover of more than £300m.

That, though, is case study in success compared with the phenomenon that is Ocado, which has been going for a decade and is still to make a profit.

Mr Gissing, complaining about “hostile” press coverage of Ocado’s flotation, said: “It frustrates me that a lot of people slate successful British businesses when we should be standing up for the good ones that are actually making money and doing the right thing.”

Without diminishing Ocado’s achievement of achieving total sales-to-date of more than £2bn, his definition of success is bewildering.

Although there is an expectation that it will make a maiden annual profit when its financial year finishes in a few months’ time, to date it has racked up aggregate losses of £350m in 10 years.

It may be that in another 10 years’ time, Ocado’s first decade of investment will prove to have been worthwhile, although analysts aren’t confident. It is curious to say the least that RBS chose to highlight the work of Ms Brady and Mr Gissing, which has almost nothing in common with the target audience of SME owners and senior managers.

There are plenty of business people, here and across the rest of the country, who are running innovative, exciting and profitable businesses. We want to hear far more from them, especially when it is a taxpayer-owned bank promoting individuals as examples of business success.