By Erin Bury
A dragon’s den is not normally seen as an inviting place. It’s dark, scary, and inhabited by a deadly creature. Not exactly a vacation.
So it is only appropriate that a TV show about ruthless business moguls would be called Dragon’s Den, conjuring up the same frightening feelings. The show is new to the CBC this year, based on the British hit of the same name that has aired in 20 other countries.
The show’s concept is simple: Canadian entrepreneurs appear in a room (the Den) before the moguls (the Dragons) and pitch their ideas for companies or products. They ask for the amount of money they need to get started, and then the Dragons grill them on the details of their idea and decide whether or not to invest the money. The deals are real, and so is the money being invested. This results in a show that is part reality show, part game show, and all entertainment.
The five Dragons are comprised of some of Canada’s top business executives. They include Laurence Lewin, who co-founded Canadian lingerie store La Senza (recently bought out by American lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret); former RCMP officer Jim Treliving, the man behind Canadian restaurant chain Boston Pizza; and Jennifer Wood, who owns an Alberta cattle company. They were chosen from several executives who auditioned, presumably as much for their personality as for their success in the business world.
Since the show premiered earlier this season on the CBC, it has enjoyed a great amount of success. It has become a bona fide hit, one of few the CBC can boast lately. Weekly viewers have increased 250 per cent since episode the first episode (episode six drew 600,000 viewers) and the numbers are climbing each week. There are portions of the show playing on YouTube, as well as parodies mocking the show’s setup.
So what does the show do for Canada? Well, it brings attention to the extreme wealth of some people and the extremely stupid ideas of others. The Dragons are all amazingly wealthy, each owning luxury cars and one of them even has a private island off the coast of Miami. To them, investing $50,000 in a startup company is just a game, a drop in the bucket of their wealth. Whether or not these companies succeed is most likely not as important to them as a good presentation accompanied by a good idea.
And they do see good ideas from time to time. One example is the men who pitched jobloft.com, a website devoted to posting jobs for the service industry and which will send a text message to a cell phone when a new job becomes available. The founders pitched their ideas in matching orange ties, and did it in a professional, informative way that was appealing to the investors. All five of the Dragons chose to invest the requested $200,000 in the innovative company.
But what about the Canadian entrepreneurs who don’t have such a solid idea? Well, they aren’t as lucky as the men in the orange ties. The Dragons shut down many ideas, while also demonstrating how silly Canadian ideas can be. Take, for example, the Bikini Weenie, an idea for a hot-dog cart manned by girls in bikinis. Or the snow limo proposed by two brothers from Whistler who thought that people who don’t like snow sports still might like to enjoy a trip down the ski slopes.
The show ends up being part American Idol, part business meeting. For the CBC, that equates to a new hit show for the money-losing network. For Canadians, it offers a chance to pitch an idea, whether harebrained or great, to successful business moguls.
So while the Dragon’s Den may still be as scary a place as the one of myth, it doesn’t have to end in disaster: it could end in business success.