the goose

The Dragon’s Den is one of the only TV programs we watch.  Lampooning the contestants and guffawing at the terrible offers is addictive.  I have to say, it also makes you stop and think.  Would someone invest in our ‘business’?  How would we answer that question?  How could he possibly not know the answer to that?

While it is light entertainment, it is also helping to build a spirit of entrepreneurialism.  It might be difficult to measure accurately, but a mass market TV program like this could actually play a part in encouraging indigenous industry and ultimately help work towards a recovery.

Having said that, there was no bloody way you were going to catch me on there.  Until, of course, Priscilla cheerfully told me that she had sent off an application form.

There was no need to take it any more seriously than that – until the day that Shinawil Productions called to ask if we could come around for an interview.  The only slight problem with this was we were about 12,000km away in Mendoza, Argentina.  We were however planning on making a trip back to the old sod for Christmas so we went on a reserve list and promised to show up for a chat.

The show is a major hit and we were told that half a million people have seen it.  We would have been silly to ignore the opportunity, even if it did mean trading in my chance at becoming the most esteemed business-man of 2010.  We started to come up with reasons why we should in fact go forward and give it a go.  For one, we kind of owe it to our customers to get them as much profile as possible.  For another, having been staunchly against taking any type of investment, it started us thinking ‘what if’.

Bizarrely, the prospect of having to open the Kimono in front of a couple of hundred thousand people began to act as motivation for business planning like we’d never planned before.  Although I have pretty much settled on my objective to find thousands of people who will pay tens of euro a month for some service, the conversion rates and marketing tactics, value proposition et al. that needed to be defined to make that a reality was never really put down on paper.

Once the flights back to Dublin were bought, we began planning in earnest. Why would anyone really want to invest in us?  One thing that seemed to make sense was, we were at least focused from the bottom up.  Rather than planning to get x% of a y million euro market, we knew how many free guides to getting into voiceovers we had to give away before someone would become a customer.  We knew how many people were working as voicevers and we pretty much had a lot of their names.   Before we got into all that however, we had to figure out what our objective was.

Whether or not we would be able to attract offers was an open question but we knew for a fact that we had to get into the 8 minute slot rather than one of the shorter 30 second slots available.  First up that meant making sure we stood out.  Thankfully, if you’ve ever met Priscilla, you’ll know this is something she can do in spades.  We made sure to mention in our interview with Shinawil what an impact we would make on the day.

Second up was trying to get our message across to the audience.  We had no control over how the show would be edited but we were fairly sure that we couldn’t control what got cut and what could not, as long as the general narrative included some key points, we would get some traction.  Particularly – we wanted people to know that we had a wealth of free and paid for training material for those looking to get into voiceover work.

After that – if we got an offer -great.  We’d have a great opportunity to work with someone used to making millions instead of thousands.  I was pretty sure that would lift our game and be worth giving away some equity.  We set about trying to find out about all the Dragons to figure out who would be our preferred investor.

Sean Gallagher has an excellent website and its clear that he enjoys mentoring businesses.  We have worked well with coaches in the past and currently pay someone to provide weekly planning sessions, so we knew we could work well with someone like that.  That aside, stupidly, he plays Judo which is something I have been doing for years and this somehow gave me an idea as to the type of guy he is.  It also explains why he has no neck.

Gavin Duffy He has a background in media and could obviously help us put some deals together which would help the businesses – especially when it comes to trying to sell.  Most people recommended him as the best fit for our business and while a little intimidated by his reputation as a tough negotiator and huge work habit, I knew for sure, having him on board would put some rocket fuel in the tank.

Sarah Newman had an obvious internet pedigree.  Priscilla likes her no-nonsense style a lot although I wasn’t quiet sure what the make of her.  Famous for not investing rather than investing – I somehow knew that whatever happened, it was important that she bought into the idea.  This would give confidence to the other Dragons and in my view, being the hardest to impress, having her onside would speak volumes to our competition.

Bobby Kerr was the only one I had a personal contact to.  While I had never met the guy – a friend is a friend of his and he gave a glowing reference.  I knew he would be a tough nut to crack however.  Internet business’ are a long way for fast moving consumer goods.  There are however more similarities than you might think and if we could convince him that we were good guys, I thought he might just enjoy the opportunity to work with us.  Getting a toe in the FMCG market is also something I’d love to do.  Perhaps not with Piehole, but if we could work with him, there were bound to be opportunities to be exploited.

Niall O’Farrell is all about retail, and again, it was going to be hard to figure out why he would be interested in us.  It didn’t do me any favours that I’d be standing in the Den wearing a Louis Copeland suit.  I only hoped his famous attention to detail didn’t extend to spotting a guy looking for money standing in a arch-rival’s tin of fruit.

So that was that.  I spent a lot of time bending the ear of friends who were more practiced in the art of looking for investment and I began to learn what it was an investor would be looking for. Handily enough, Sean pretty much spells this out on his own website.

So that is pretty much all we can say for now.  I’ll be following up with some more posts on the various things we’ve had to do to get prepared, including making sure the website doesn’t fall over, our strategy behind our pitch and a post-mortem on Thursday night.

PS:  If anyone out there has access to a slingbox we could borrow – shout.  We’ve no way of watching the show live other than pointing a webcam at a TV right now.