Business on TV
Feb. 9th, 2007 11:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaning“Dragons’ Den” returned to BBC2 yesterday; and just after it was “Jamie’s Chef” on C4. I wouldn’t normally have thought of “Jamie’s Chef” as a business programme, but that is what this series really is.
“Dragons’ Den” is interesting: the dragons – five investors who have nothing better to do with their time than appear on tv – get pitched to by people who are looking for investors. And most of the time, the dragons get to be very rude about the poor people with ideas.
Very often, the ideas are good, but the people with the ideas aren’t the right people to run the business. This happened yesterday, when a woman running a franchise selling massage and beauty treatments in hair salons, Gili Kucci, tried to sell her ideas for expansion. She told a great story, and they loved her – until she started on the numbers. And then she fell apart – she really didn’t understand the numbers side of the business – and frankly, if you are asking someone to part with £150k (or thereabouts) you really need to be straight on the numbers. One by one, the dragons tore into her – except one, Duncan Bannatyne (the token, irascible Scot), who got what she was saying, and translated (thereby showing up the other dragons to be heartless bastards). Still, he didn’t want to give the poor woman his money, and neither would I.
This programme really works when the dragons stop laying into the would-be entrepreneurs and start attacking each other. Twice last night a bidding war broke out: and then it got interesting. The first time was with two young guys – well, they looked bloody young to me – who ran a chilled distribution business. (I actually missed what it was that they were distributing: I thought it was pharmaceuticals, but then they have Marks & Spencer as a customer, so maybe not…) They were very good – very controlled and disciplined, they knew their stuff, they had a great story – and they were really on top of their numbers. The dragons were falling over each other to throw money at these guys – on their terms (the two blokes were looking for £140k or so for – I think – 8% of the business; they got it for 20% or so), of course – but the dragons were outbidding each other. That was fun.
The other highlight was a musician called Levi Roots. He had a small business selling a couple of thousand bottles of a food sauce at the Notting Hill Carnival – two thousand bottles of Reggae Reggae Sauce a year. The rest of the time he was a reggae musician and record producer. (He admitted that his real name was Keith, which kind of blew his cool.) He was a really nice guy – he came across as someone who’d be a laugh (but simultaneously bloody irritating – if you had to work with him). He wanted to build his business, since he had an order for millions of bottles of his sauce.
Except he didn’t. He’d done his sums wrong – he’d got his decimal places completely wrong. And it was an “interest”, rather than an order. Thing is, even after his mistake became apparent, the dragons still wanted to give him their money. He got all that he was after – despite not being on top of the numbers. (Indeed, being so overwhelmed by the numbers that it was scary.) It is fascinating that they liked Levi Roots but they had torn Gili Kucci apart. It can only have been his character that made a difference: she got pushy and aggressive, he got laid back and relaxed.
“Jamie’s Chef” is a follow up to Jamie Oliver’s series where he turned a bunch no-hopers into chefs, creating the restaurant 15 (since there were fifteen of them). Then, he took these young people, and changed their lives by teaching them to cook.
In the new series, he wants to take one of these guys, and turn them from a chef into a restaurateur – running the whole shebang, a “gastro-pub” in the Essex countryside. But this is patently foolish: the four aspiring cooks are severely lacking in their front-of-house and business skills, because they have spent their time cooking: and they are clearly good cooks. Why would Oliver’s charity pluck one chef and give them their own restaurant (and risk £500k)? Why not create a restaurant where they can all work, managed by someone who actually knows what they are doing?
It doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
Except that it does make quite interesting telly.
As Jamie Oliver kept saying, “one in two [or was it three out of four?] restaurants fold within a year.” Why waste this opportunity on an inexperienced chef – perhaps risking his future, as well? Failing in public can’t be easy.
Last week, one of the four decided – absolutely correctly – that what he liked doing was cooking; he didn’t like bossing people around, he didn’t like creating a business plan. And so he decided not to participate any more.
The three remaining chefs battled it out, culminating in a Dragons’ Den-style pitch of their business plans. The guy with the most heartfelt story won – he had kids to boost the cuteness factor. (Was this a business decision – or a tv decision?)
The one woman in the bunch - she alienated the staff because she shouted at them too much (she must have been watching Gordon Ramsay) – really wouldn’t have worked – she wanted to remove all the beer from the pub and force feed the locals Thai food. She’d be great in Islington, though.
The other guy was a Cockney – they had to use subtitles when interviewing his father. (Actually, they didn’t have to: the father was perfectly comprehensible. I was shocked last week when they had subtitled the Irish mother of the guy that dropped out: it was so bizarre, since I could hear and understand every word she said. I was actually glad when they did the same for a Londoner – at least they weren’t being anti-Irish. I can only think they have sold this to the States or somewhere where they have troubled understanding English – or Irish – accents.) He was so cocky – he would force the locals to drink chianti instead of bitter – that the winner was clear, even without his family.
I still don’t get the whole premise, though. It is so contrived. These guys are good chefs. They have only been cooking for a couple of years; they have a lot to learn about business. So why put them through this – sink-or-swim in front of the cameras? There were lots of shots of Jamie emoting with his acolytes, lots of debate about whether they should really be doing this – but not one answer as to why.
Still, it entertained me.
“Dragons’ Den” is interesting: the dragons – five investors who have nothing better to do with their time than appear on tv – get pitched to by people who are looking for investors. And most of the time, the dragons get to be very rude about the poor people with ideas.
Very often, the ideas are good, but the people with the ideas aren’t the right people to run the business. This happened yesterday, when a woman running a franchise selling massage and beauty treatments in hair salons, Gili Kucci, tried to sell her ideas for expansion. She told a great story, and they loved her – until she started on the numbers. And then she fell apart – she really didn’t understand the numbers side of the business – and frankly, if you are asking someone to part with £150k (or thereabouts) you really need to be straight on the numbers. One by one, the dragons tore into her – except one, Duncan Bannatyne (the token, irascible Scot), who got what she was saying, and translated (thereby showing up the other dragons to be heartless bastards). Still, he didn’t want to give the poor woman his money, and neither would I.
This programme really works when the dragons stop laying into the would-be entrepreneurs and start attacking each other. Twice last night a bidding war broke out: and then it got interesting. The first time was with two young guys – well, they looked bloody young to me – who ran a chilled distribution business. (I actually missed what it was that they were distributing: I thought it was pharmaceuticals, but then they have Marks & Spencer as a customer, so maybe not…) They were very good – very controlled and disciplined, they knew their stuff, they had a great story – and they were really on top of their numbers. The dragons were falling over each other to throw money at these guys – on their terms (the two blokes were looking for £140k or so for – I think – 8% of the business; they got it for 20% or so), of course – but the dragons were outbidding each other. That was fun.
The other highlight was a musician called Levi Roots. He had a small business selling a couple of thousand bottles of a food sauce at the Notting Hill Carnival – two thousand bottles of Reggae Reggae Sauce a year. The rest of the time he was a reggae musician and record producer. (He admitted that his real name was Keith, which kind of blew his cool.) He was a really nice guy – he came across as someone who’d be a laugh (but simultaneously bloody irritating – if you had to work with him). He wanted to build his business, since he had an order for millions of bottles of his sauce.
Except he didn’t. He’d done his sums wrong – he’d got his decimal places completely wrong. And it was an “interest”, rather than an order. Thing is, even after his mistake became apparent, the dragons still wanted to give him their money. He got all that he was after – despite not being on top of the numbers. (Indeed, being so overwhelmed by the numbers that it was scary.) It is fascinating that they liked Levi Roots but they had torn Gili Kucci apart. It can only have been his character that made a difference: she got pushy and aggressive, he got laid back and relaxed.
“Jamie’s Chef” is a follow up to Jamie Oliver’s series where he turned a bunch no-hopers into chefs, creating the restaurant 15 (since there were fifteen of them). Then, he took these young people, and changed their lives by teaching them to cook.
In the new series, he wants to take one of these guys, and turn them from a chef into a restaurateur – running the whole shebang, a “gastro-pub” in the Essex countryside. But this is patently foolish: the four aspiring cooks are severely lacking in their front-of-house and business skills, because they have spent their time cooking: and they are clearly good cooks. Why would Oliver’s charity pluck one chef and give them their own restaurant (and risk £500k)? Why not create a restaurant where they can all work, managed by someone who actually knows what they are doing?
It doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
Except that it does make quite interesting telly.
As Jamie Oliver kept saying, “one in two [or was it three out of four?] restaurants fold within a year.” Why waste this opportunity on an inexperienced chef – perhaps risking his future, as well? Failing in public can’t be easy.
Last week, one of the four decided – absolutely correctly – that what he liked doing was cooking; he didn’t like bossing people around, he didn’t like creating a business plan. And so he decided not to participate any more.
The three remaining chefs battled it out, culminating in a Dragons’ Den-style pitch of their business plans. The guy with the most heartfelt story won – he had kids to boost the cuteness factor. (Was this a business decision – or a tv decision?)
The one woman in the bunch - she alienated the staff because she shouted at them too much (she must have been watching Gordon Ramsay) – really wouldn’t have worked – she wanted to remove all the beer from the pub and force feed the locals Thai food. She’d be great in Islington, though.
The other guy was a Cockney – they had to use subtitles when interviewing his father. (Actually, they didn’t have to: the father was perfectly comprehensible. I was shocked last week when they had subtitled the Irish mother of the guy that dropped out: it was so bizarre, since I could hear and understand every word she said. I was actually glad when they did the same for a Londoner – at least they weren’t being anti-Irish. I can only think they have sold this to the States or somewhere where they have troubled understanding English – or Irish – accents.) He was so cocky – he would force the locals to drink chianti instead of bitter – that the winner was clear, even without his family.
I still don’t get the whole premise, though. It is so contrived. These guys are good chefs. They have only been cooking for a couple of years; they have a lot to learn about business. So why put them through this – sink-or-swim in front of the cameras? There were lots of shots of Jamie emoting with his acolytes, lots of debate about whether they should really be doing this – but not one answer as to why.
Still, it entertained me.