Money Watch – Personal Finance Blog

One of the more interesting programmes to show up on the BBC in the past year has been “Dragons Den” on BBC2 (it started about 6 months ago I think, although it has been repeated recently and looking at the programme website it looks like a new series may be on the cards). In the show, wannabe business people, entrepreneurs and inventors pitched their ideas to a panel of succesful business people to try to impress them enough to invest in them.

In a lot of cases, the experience would be a little too much for the pitchers and they’d struggle to impress the panel of “dragons”, or the dragons would immediately spot a flaw in the idea and rip it to shreds. Occasionally however they would be impressed and put their money where their (generally big) mouths were.

It was interesting to see how the dragons worked, even within the confines of a TV show. On occasions, they might unimpressed with the product but more impressed with the person pitching the idea, and would decide to invest in it based on this. On other occasions it would be the other way round, realising that the product was good, but it would need someone with more of a business brain to take it forward.

Added to this, there was often conflict between the dragons themselves – there were often arguments about whether an idea was good or not, and you often got the impression that even in this slightly contrived situation they were only thinking of one thing; making money.

It’s interesting to see that one of the dragons, Rachel Elnaugh, is now having a tough time with her own business, “adventure experience firm” Red Letter Days – and she may actually now be trying to sell to one of her fellow dragons.

Now there’s one pitch that I’d like to see on Dragons Den.