It was the biggest dragon-slaying since the days of Saint George – and it could turn out to be Steven Bartlett’s most successful ever gamble on Dragons’ Den.
Last week millions of viewers saw a sometimes tetchy but determined Bartlett win a four-way battle with his fellow Dragons to invest £80,000 for a 5 per cent stake in Will Little’s Devon-based coffee company Little Coffee.
The negotiations got increasingly heated as Touker Suleyman branded his fellow Dragon ‘greedy’ for wanting 7.5 per cent of the business – to which Bartlett replied: “You’ve got to know what you’re worth.”
An animated Bartlett then turned his attention on Deborah Meaden and Peter Jones, who’d joined forces to offer £80,000 for a combined 4 per cent stake in the business.
The Diary of a CEO podcast host said: “There’s a reason they’re doing this. I let you guys speak, please let me finish what I’m saying.”
He then reduced his demand to 5 per cent of the equity – the same as Sara Davies – and had his offer accepted by a delighted Will Little.
Will Little, of Little Coffee, on Dragons’ Den
Just a few days after the programme aired and it’s looking like Bartlett’s big gamble is already paying off.
According to Little, ‘things have gone totally crazy’ in the first 72 hours after the BBC show was aired with thousands of orders pouring in.
- The company has completely sold out at Sainsbury’s and Waitrose
- They’ve reported an uplift of over 500 per cent in store;
- They’ve done three months’ worth of D2C sales in four days;
- Little Coffee has become the No.1 bestselling instant coffee on Amazon;
- Email subscribers have gone up 61 per cent; and
- The coffee company has had 628,000 views on Instagram.
Staff worked through the weekend to deal with the surge in orders as the company’s social media accounts went into overdrive.
The social media activity was coordinated with military decision with several members of Bartlett’s team at Flight Story were namechecked in the company’s LinkedIn posts.
“This feels like the start of the revolution!” wrote Little. “Let’s GOOOO!”
None of this will come as a surprise to a marketing genius like Bartlett.
I rewatched the programme and Bartlett predicted what would happen with Nostradamus-like accuracy.
The first thing he did was highlight the sluggish growth of the firm, which was founded by Little’s parents and had grown turnover to £4m.
“I rarely see a business that has this kind of flat growth profile, which is very rare,” said Bartlett.
“It’s very rare to see a business that’s at that £4m level, but did £3.8m the previous year, and then £3.5m the year before. What? How do you explain that?”
Luckily the solution was in front of Little’s eyes – Steven Bartlett.
“The unique skills you need to scale this business, they cost millions and millions of pounds, typically, for brands like this to acquire those skills,” he told Little when trying to get his offer accepted over the rival combined offer from Jones and Meaden.
“I can bring those skills into your company. In the Den’s history, there’s never been a product that is more well suited for me than this, and that’s why they teamed up against me.”
The 32-year-old also deliberately referenced his involvement in the growth of nutrition brand Huel.
“The journey you need to go on is a journey that I’ve been on several times,” he said.
“There’s a certain element of fortune when you catch cultural zeitgeist in the way that this brand could or could not take off.
“We’ve done that a few times, in several cases. I’m on the board of a company called Huel who’s managed to catch culture and accelerated that to record a billion dollar business. I think I’m the perfect Dragon for this business. I can’t say it in any other way.”
After the episode was recorded Bartlett resigned as a director of Huel in January after nearly four years but now the Dragon has a new drink to get behind.
- Additional reporting by Patrick Killeen.
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