Cold Hard Truth: Learning From Dragons Den’s Kevin O’Leary On Business, Money And Life Part 2

September 14, 2011

The business he’s referring to was Jobloft, a website for advertising minimum wage jobs mainly for restaurants.  All of the 5 Dragons were very interested in the pitch, especially Jim Treliving, founder of Boston Pizza, who knows well the problems of finding good, honest, reliable workers in a high turnover business such as the hospitality industry.

O’Leary responded to his detractor that he and the other Dragons had every right to demand so much control and such a high financial share in the company because none of the entrepreneurs in this startup had ever run a business before.  More on JobLoft and the dramatic events that unfolded with this business later on.

It’s completely understandable if O’Leary rubs many people the wrong way.  Like Simon Cowell on American Idol, O’Leary is very blunt, even cruel, in the feedback he gives to people who pitch business ideas on Dragon’s Den.  He even made one woman cry who pitched a business idea on “Aerial Angels” Dragon’s Den.

O’Leary recently got two Canadian unions howling for his blood after he stated on a recent CBC news broadcast that if he were elected prime minister he would “make unions illegal” and that union members should be “thrown in jail”.  O’Leary went on to say that “unions are sheer evil … unions themselves are born out of evil. They must be destroyed with evil.  Look, no one could contain unions in hell. They were so evil they came out of hell and they came upon earth.”  Not exactly beating around the bush!

I don’t totally agree with O’Leary’s harsh approach to these aspiring entrepreneurs, nor do many of the other Dragons, judging from their reactions to O’Leary’s usual vitriol so often directed at people pitching business ideas.  It would be a real shame if an aspiring entrepreneur who got castigated by O’Leary’s feedback was at all discouraged in pursuing their business ideas and believing in themselves just because of O’Leary’s abrasive style.  At the same time, aspiring entrepreneurs need to realize they will get a lot of rejection with their business on a regular basis.  If you can’t handle rejection well by learning from it rather than taking such rejection personally and getting down on yourself then being a business owner is not for you.

Filed under: Inspiration

Tags: angel, capital, den, Dragon, investor, shark, startup, tank, venture