Dragon's Den Tell-All. Behind Our Reality TV Experience.

Written by Shaun Frankson

My experience filming Dragon's Den, for the Oct 5th 2016 Season 11 Premiere, gave me a rare behind-the-scenes look into how a reality show is created. As I walked away from the film studio, on April 26th, 2016, I understood more than ever that Dragon's Den is a reality TV show above all else. The producer's goal is to make entertaining TV; and conflict is entertaining. David Katz and I went in knowing that the editing process is the big wild-card in the whole equation. It's a bit unsettling that we have no control over editing considering how many people's lives are impacted by the way our brand is portrayed. It's important to understand that when 50 minutes of aggressive, rapid-fire Q & A is edited down to about 6 minutes, some of the segment is likely shown out of context. As I walked out of the studio, I felt that there was a 75% chance that we will come through in a positive light after editing; leaving a 25% chance that a misleading comment by one of the Dragons could negatively impact our brand. We knew about this risk the day we agreed to film the show and we've never been the type of people to back down from a risk.

I wrote this article before seeing the episode myself, so it's possible that some of the points I address were left on the editing room floor. I made notes the night after filming and edited them into this blog article a few days before the episode aired. I hope you enjoy my honest and open reflections of our Dragons' Den reality TV experience. 

Our episode of Dragons' Den Season 11 was filmed on April 26th, 2016 in Toronto, Canada. I flew in from Vancouver a couple days earlier to set up our props at the CBC Studios. David had just returned from an investment meeting in Washington, DC on the 24th. We both spent the 23rd at CBC studios getting comfortable with the set and the studio environment. That day was crucial as our existing business commitments and travel schedules didn't leave much time to practice beforehand. I was surprised to learn that we were one of the only contestants ever to set up the day before to practice at the studio. That really helped us feel comfortable knowing that our props were already good to go. Another surprise was that the Dragon's Den set was on the 7th floor of CBC studios - I always assumed it was a ground-floor warehouse or something.

On the day of filming, we arrived at the studio at 7:45 am to rehearse backstage until our 10:30 am filming time. As Vancouver is 3 hours behind Toronto time, that felt like a 3 am wake up for me.

We were fully aware that we were fighting an uphill battle when we agreed to use our real business valuation based on our upcoming sales. We could have used a lower valuation for TV to avoid the dragon fire but that didn't sit right with us. We felt it would have been wrong for us to offer a 'fake' valuation just for TV, while talking to real investors in real life using a higher valuation. The fact that we were pre-revenue at the time with a $10,000,000 valuation pretty much guaranteed a Dragon roasting. But our sales deals were still in the process of far being finalized at the time of filming. 

The other road block came from the NDA's (non-disclosure-agreements) we have with our clients. Legally we cannot mention any of our clients' names before they officially announce their new product lines. TV is not worth jeopardizing our business relationships.

We had initially planned to be joined by someone from Canada's largest charity, World Vision, to promote our work togethe, but the producers recommended keeping it simple. We also wanted to fly in our Haiti staff to join us for the pitch, but once again, the producers stressed that it's best to have 2 people max. We had planned to give the Dragons some fresh new sunglasses made by Norton Point from our plastic collected in Haiti. However, the producers wanted to avoid confusing the Dragon's about our core business - setting up ethically sourced supply chains to collect and sell Social Plastic. So we scratched the sunglass idea at the last minute and changed our pitch around. In the end, I agreed with their "less is more" philosophy as it made for a cleaner pitch.

At 10:30 am the lights went down, the director yelled action and David and I began the iconic entrance - where our backlight silhouettes walk into the Den.  

We stopped on our markers and I tossed my bag of plastic bottles towards the Dragons to begin our pitch. As we ran through our intro I recall Manjeet scoffing at our valuation, and Joe asking David to repeat it in disbelief. Not a motivating start but it's what we expected.

The director then stopped us in the middle of our intro because the set team had misplaced the scale we used to weigh the plastic. They called cut, brought in the scale, counted down and we started over from the moment I started cleaning up the bottles on stage.

I'm a hand talker and I thought I may have hit my lapel mic during my intro. Hopefully, that didn't cut out a major line. But all in all, I felt that David and I nailed the intro portion.

You have 3 minutes max to complete your intro and demo. After that, the session opens up to a lightning fast, aggressive Q & A designed to cause highly emotional dialogue and encourage slip of the tongue responses. Remember, in the end, this is a reality TV show that requires conflict to be entertaining.

During the next 45 minutes, we both offered some lines that we would have liked to take back as they opened up a rabbit hole of Dragon fire.

In the heat of the moment, David misspoke by saying that his entire 2.5 million dollar investment went towards salaries. They asked how many employees live in Canada and David said 5. I have no idea why the Dragons wouldn't include our larger number of Haitian staff in this conversation. They did the math and assumed we were paying everyone over 200k to work for us and Micheal Wekerly (Wek) said David must be getting paid 500k a year. He went on to say that if you pay that much, "I want to work for you". This was fantastically far from reality but Wek continued on this misguided rant for a while. David has never drawn a salary and he has personally invested over 2.5 million dollars of his own money to get the business to where we are today. The bulk of the expenses have gone into operations, including; setting up a pilot in Peru, saving the failing recycling ecosystem in Haiti, delivering samples and orders to our existing clients and traveling to various client and partner meetings around the globe. Our largest clients are in 5 different countries and creating genuine relationships with billion dollar brands requires a large amount of face time and travel. 

Jim stated, "I don't understand why you have to pay people, I would get volunteers to fly out to Haiti for free." We're proud that we hired a rockstar team in Haiti. Our local country manager is an exceptional Haitian born woman with an American MBA. You need to have a good team to change the world. I disagree with the logic that cause-based businesses should not try to attract talent, but only work with volunteers. However, the advice to seek out more volunteers and sponsorship was solid advice and something we have improved upon. We really appreciated that feedback from Jim after some reflection.

During the pitch I mentioned that we took over the operations of an existing charity in Haiti as our starting point. When the global oil prices dropped to an unsustainable level in 2015, roughly 90% of the world's informal recycling industry dropped off. This opened the door to being labeled as a charity for the remainder of the pitch. I didn't want to misrepresent that we started everything from scratch in Haiti. We were asked to help save the recycling ecosystem by converting the existing programs into our Social Plastic Recycling Markets and sustain the rate recyclers earn by selling it as Social Plastic.

Joe seemed to be the most open to the message, but after Wek and Jim continued to interrupt him, he stormed off stage in frustration. In some ways, I think Joe may have done us a huge favor, by making it good TV. Walking out may have been the best way for Joe to help get our story out to more people. After the filming, I asked the producers if Joe had ever stormed out before. I was told that was a first and they were shocked to hear about it. This may have been one reason why we made the season premiere.

The Dragons also got hung up with our use of the term 'franchising'. We didn't get a chance to clarify how we expand at scale. We expand when our client purchase orders exceed our existing capacity for collection in each country. We are able to fast track our expansion through regional sponsorships and our partnership with World Vision. I've later come to learn that the more appropriate term for our expansion is a "replication" model. 

Jim came to a firm conclusion that if our projected sales were true, we didn't need his money. After Jim declared he was out, David shot back by stating, that if he really cared about the environment and people in need, he should reconsider. This caused a further explosion on the part of Michael Wekerle. Whatever amount of ranting you saw Wek do on TV. Multiply it by 10 and you get an idea of our experience on set.

Towards the end of the pitch, I felt like Jim had a much better grasp of the business and seemed to be responding better as the pitch went on, but that didn't change his opinion that we didn't need Dragon money. Keep doing what we're doing. I have a lot of respect for Jim Treliving. We took to heart a couple of his suggestions. We were also thrilled to hear that Jim was already involved in some projects in Haiti. That is a country that is very close to our hearts. 

In an effort to break Wek's monologue, and open the door to hear Michelle's opinion I said "Michelle, I'd love to give you the floor." To which she replied. "Oh, you're giving me the floor." Wrong choice of wording on my part. But I was trying to get the pitch back on course as we could feel it slipping away. The momentum was not going in our favour at that point. 

It felt like Manjeet was siding with Wek and agreed with his points but that may have been my own opinion. I can't remember if she said anything to confirm that suspicion, or if it was just her expressions of disinterest, but I felt that Manjeet had no interest in hearing our pitch.

I'm proud that David and I kept our composure while being blasted with Dragon fire for 45 straight minutes. The arguments began between Wek and Jim but later were mostly between Wek and Wek.

Wek kept repeating that this was a life style business and a charity. Which is something we took offence to as social entrepreneurs who are building a triple bottom line business.

The money we asked for was primarily to fund new technology platforms for the Social Plastic ecosystem. Michelle didn't understand why we would create our own technology platform when there are existing platforms available. But I had something much bigger in mind than a social site, but I didn't want to get into those details during the pitch. Since filming I have been working with IBM Montpellier France to design a (Hyperleder/Blockchain) plastics for credits exchange platform. This is a very complex topic that I will explain later as the project progresses.

I felt like Wek's behavior was child-like during the pitch. Wek railroaded any hope of this pitch leading to a deal at all by taking up 60% of our pitch time. We actually saw Wek enter the building when he arrived. Both his tone of voice and mannerisms are nothing short of odd - perhaps unique is a better word.

Wek's rant was further fueled when we mentioned that currently people are buying plastic at the commodity rates and that as our purchase orders come through, we will introduce our life improving social plastic premiums. I think Wek wanted to say, "I'm a Bay Street Trader, don't tell me how commodity markets work." But he completely misunderstood the context of how it applies to our situation. We had to invest in the infrastructrure before we could accomidate large scale orders.

To wrap it up, Manjeet shrewdly announced our time to leave by pointing us to door 11. I would have sworn the entire pitch was 5 minutes max. Later I was told it did go beyond 45 minutes - which made me feel a little bit better. 

On the way out, I heard Manjeet's parting words. "This is the Dragon's Den, not the charity den." 

I really wish Brett Wilson, Bruce Croxon, and Arlene Dickenson where still on the show. It was nice when the Dragons had an appreciation of Social Entrepreneurship.

I wrote the notes for this article about 6 hours after pitching while sitting in an airport lounge. This was about all I remember. The rest just feels like a blur.

Our biggest fear was that the episode might be edited in a way that some of Wek's statements, based on bad assumptions, would sound like facts from a reputable Dragon.

I was perplexed that three Dragons thought it would cost nothing to build a global infrastructure to sustainably recycle plastic while oil prices are plummeting.

I recall Jim saying that "you're giving it away for free right now, and losing money." None of the dragon's seemed to understand the concept of investing in the infrastructure to sustain multi-million dollar orders while improving the lives of all those involved. That is not easy, or cheap to do, but it is necessary.

8 hours after filming, David flew to Europe to close partnerships with a couple new huge clients. 

As a final note about the reference to this being a life style business. Yes, it is a blessing to love what you do and know that your actions are creating a genuine change, but it's not as easy or luxurious as it may seem.

Here is a recent post by David that highlights the reality of 'traveling for work'. This clip from David's Facebook account was a description of 1 full day out of a 21 day sales trip. This is also 21 straight days away from his family. That is not what we call a lifestyle business, but it is what's required to make a genuine global impact.

To keep costs down we cram our overseas trips with as many meetings as possible. It is a non-stop effort to maximize the opportunity in every country. 

I hope you enjoyed my open and honest reflection of our Dragon's Den experience. We will continue to look for new and better ways to communicate the behind the scenes look of our story as it continues to unfold. 

If you would to learn more or contribute to our Social Plastic movement, please visit PlasticBank.org.