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The Ivey Entrepreneur Podcast improves your odds of entrepreneurial success by sharing the stories and lessons learned of world-class entrepreneurs.
Janice Byrne
Tell me a little bit about the Dragons' Den adventure and how you well, how that turn came out and then and what came out of it.
Kristine Beese
So Dragon's Den was interesting. They actually asked us to apply. And then I had a a girlfriend who I did my MBA with here at Ivy who helped me. She's in communications and and it's not a strength of mine. And so she really helped me hone my pitch and and because at this point now, Ria had had gone to business school herself and and I was now doing the pitching. But this was probably the biggest and one of the first times I was doing the pitching. No big deal. And and it's 60 minutes of filming, and it is terrifying. It is it is unbelievably terrifying. And I didn't know if we would get there in the end. But I had, you know, I was I was lucky enough for Erin Burry from Willful had given me a bunch of her time talking about her experience before me. They had a lot of strengths that we didn't have better numbers, and I wish I had brought a second person with me even if it was just a stand in, because there are some really challenging questions that sort of throw you for a mental loop and and, you know, they're filming real time and they're not they're not necessarily gonna kindly edit you. Right. I think they did, but they didn't have to. Right? So you're I've I've felt the constant pressure.
Janice Byrne
I feel like the screen goes in on your face when they say things.
Kristine Beese
Right? Yeah. And then and then when you watch it, they've compiled it
Janice Byrne
Right. Of course.
Kristine Beese
In totally different ways. Yeah. And so it's it worked out well in the end, in the way they presented it. But, my son wanted to show it to his class for show and tell, and the teacher came up to me and said, you know, Thomas would really like to show the Dragon's Den pitch too. Yeah.
He's my biggest supporter. He, like, take I have these pins that I had made for dragon's friend. I've I've only needed 1, and I have 250 of them. Right? So he sneaks them and he gets them out of school.
And I'm like, Thomas, I love that he wants to do it, but I'm also like, I don't think we're allowed to do it. I don't I think that might be frowned upon. And then the teacher came up to me and he said, you know, I watched it and it seems fine, but Thomas also mentioned that you cried for 2 weeks afterwards. So are you okay if we show it? And I had only seen it once at that point.
I said, I'm I'm sure it's fine. And I watched it again, and it was like, yeah. Yeah. It's fine.
Janice Byrne
Yeah. I love it. The doughnut thing was just magic.
Kristine Beese
That was so a girlfriend of mine who is in in film, came Lina came up with that. She's like, I think I think she's like, you know, if you if you because I had these stats and I was trying to figure out what it could be in. She said, what about donuts? I mean, just cutting them out.
Janice Byrne
And then the pink one and the blue one. (Yes. Yes.) I noticed.
Kristine Beese
We found them those that's a local, from the West End of Toronto, made donuts and they're so vibrant. So we'd gone on to Facebook mom's group and said, who has the most colorful donuts that they could have? And they, like, crowd sourced it. It was incredible. Really incredible.
And then…
Janice Byrne
What was the outcome of that? The whole…
Kristine Beese
We ended up not taking the deal in the end. But…
Janice Byrne
So even though you agree on screen or whatever, you don't… it’s not binding.
Kristine Beese
Yes. It’s not binding. And in the end, you know, it wasn't gonna be advantageous for us. And there were things that we wanted to do to make it a better we wanted to get into a position where we could, you know, ask for more money. But Manjeet was really great, and she introduced me to some people on of her own accord afterwards. We spent the the summer after that in Calgary where and she's in the Calgary area. I think she is in Calgary Calgary or Edmonton. I can't remember. And so she introduced me to some people there, which is really great. So an avid supporter of what we're doing even though she's not financially invested at this time. Cool.