Becoming resilient in the face of tragedy - Dragon's Den Blog

As someone who wouldn't tend to watch Dragon's Den I was drawn in by Craig Hill, the owner of 'Landscapes for learning Ltd', a company with the aim of providing outdoor educational resources for primary schools. Craig went to meet the dragons in the hopes of gaining a £50,000 investment, in return for a 15% stake of his company.

Craig enters the den on a positive quote of “Like anything in life, anything worth having, never came easy.” This can be seen later on in the episode when he reveals that his motivations behind starting ‘Landscapes for Learning Ltd’ were due to his daughter getting into an accident when she was younger, therefore leading to Craig becoming depressed and unable to continue his job as a special need’s art teacher.

This led me to think that he was an ideal candidate for an investment from a dragon, as I believe that someone who has seen the worst of things, can only go up from there and will have large amounts of motivation to become successful, therefore being increasingly likely to add value to the company in the upcoming years.

At the end of Craig’s next year, he valued that his company would be making a net of £80,000 and due to Craig presenting a company that essentially sells itself, with one of the dragons predicting that ‘Landscapes for Learning Ltd’ could become a £1 million business in the next 3 years, it leads to the question of how accurate can someone’s valuation of a company be? A prime example of this is from reusable water bottle entrepreneur Andrew Eversden.

Eversden entered the den claiming that company; ‘Join the pipe UK’, would have a value of £2 million in the first 2 years. This intrigued the dragons and led them to question what the company’s current valuation was, to which Eversden responded with figures of around ten to twenty thousand. Which in my opinion, is laughable to think that a company that is new to the UK market, would gain enough traction in 2 years to increase valuation by £1.98 million. This is an opinion that I think I share with all of the dragons, as his pitch ended in no investor, with Tej Lalvani making the point that it took parent company; ‘Join the Pipe’, 5 years to gain a value of €1.35 million in the Netherlands, which leads me to question how would Eversden plan to make so much more, in less than half the time?

Because of being so interested by Craig Hills’s story I decided to do a little research to find out how his company is doing, ever since receiving the £50,000 investment from Peter Jones in return for 30% of the business. Through a quick google search I was able to find Landscape for Learning Ltd.’s website in which it looks as if their product range has extended, which could therefore add value through additional purchases when pitching to schools.

From watching this episode of Dragons den, I have learnt that when pitching to potential investors, it is never a good idea to value your company at an extremely high number, with no evidence to back up such high levels of growth, as it can just end in absolute disaster (which I’m sure that Andrew Eversden is realising right about now).