I am sat in my office on a grey January day, slippers on and enjoying a quick cuppa in-between trying to cross off a trillion jobs on my to do list.
So of course what do you do when your busy, you write a blog!
So this time 12 months ago I was doing something quite different to today and this is the reason I am so busy right now. This time last year I was heading to my first meeting with the team behind Dragons Den.
In early 2017, I received a phone call out of the blue. It was the team behind Dragons Den and they asked if I would be interested in potentially appearing on the show! Well how about that for a grey January day! It quickly put pay to my January blues.
What I didn’t register at the time of taking the call was the fact that I had two weeks to get all the paperwork to them that they required. When I say there was a lot, I mean like a truck load. This is where team Tickle Tots came in, we spent days pulling invoices out of mailboxes and photocopying design registration documents and analysing figures. I may need to confess now that it may have got a little out of control, and resulted in copious amounts of tea, biscuits and of course the odd glass of wine to get us through!
Now I needed to put together a pitch. This was probably one of the more difficult parts of the process for me. You only have 3 minutes and in that time you need to get across your passion and potential of your business and convince a room full of strangers to part with their hard earned cash! I tend to get a little embarrassed practising in front of others, so Daddy Bear got a couple of quick run throughs and then we were off!
Throughout the two weeks I was given to prepare I had a niggling feeling of whether this was the right thing to be doing, and if it was, was it the right time for the business. I wonder if other entrepreneurs have this before appearing on the show. During those weeks I went between yes I am definitely going to the audition, to no I am not going, its just too soon.
It was literally down to the last few days before the audition that I decided to just go for it. What was the worst that could happen? They could say no and I wouldn’t have lost anything, and on the positive side, all my files and paperwork were now in order!
