Sharon shows she's got the Wright stuff

Another cracking episode of the Dragons’ Den last night saw Sharon Wright, the ‘Star of Scunthorpe’, walk away with £80,000 investment from Duncan Bannatyne and James Caan for 22.5% of her Magnamole business. The show combined excellent entertainment with some real lessons in how to be a successful entrepreneur.

Her story was an inspiring one that, for me, was a parable of what being an entrepreneur is all about.

Sharon saw an installation engineer struggling to feed a wire through a cavity wall. He had no tools to do the job, and had fashioned his own out of a bent coat hanger.

Lesson 1 - Look for a real problem that real people have every day, then find a solution to it.

Sharon’s background was in HR and Health and Safety, but she saw a solution to a problem that millions of installation engineers around the world had missed. Her solution was so blindingly obvious (in retrospect) that it seems incredible that nobody else had come up with the idea.

Lesson 2 – Sometimes when you are grappling with a problem every day you are too close to see a solution. It is possible, with imagination and flair, to find a solution that even the experts miss. We can all do this.

Sharon’s solution was intrinsically simple and unfussy.

Lesson 3 – Simple = good

Sharon had made good progress in protecting her intellectual property with a UK patent already granted, and an international parent in the pipeline.

Lesson 4 – If you want investment, you must protect your Intellectual Property.

Sharon had already made some significant sales and signed some significant contracts.

Lesson 5 – If you are looking for investment, then tangible sales and contracts count more than projections and promises.

Having made solid progress in the UK, Sharon was now looking overseas.

Lesson 6 – You’re not going to get it right first time. Make your mistakes and learn your lessons in your home market where you can more easily identify and fix any problems. Don’t take it overseas until you have a cast-iron proposition.

Sharon had clearly been working extremely hard to get to this point. Her commitment, enthusiasm and ability were all matched by the hard work she had put in.

Lesson 7 – The inspiration bit is difficult enough, but it’s the perspiration that sorts the great entrepreneurs from the dreamers. This is the biggest lesson of all. The person who says “Well actually, I’m an ideas person” gets nowhere!

Sharon was a very effective business person but she was personable, respectful and humble.

Lesson 8 – You don’t have to be ruthless to get on in business – just genuine. ‘Arrogant and hard’ is what people do to hide their insincerity.

Sharon was extremely clear in her description of her product and the problem it was solving.

Lesson 9 – Keep it simple – if a would-be investor doesn’t understand what you are trying to achieve with your product or service in the first 30 seconds of your pitch, then you are unlikely to get investment. Sharon’s clear pitch made sure that she was treated with respect in the Den from the very start.

Sharon realised the problems she was going to have to face in the future, and was doing something now to bring the expertise she needed into the business.

Lesson 10 – Know your limits. There are only 24 hours in the day, and even if you are working all 24 of them you can’t work 25. Identify the factors that will constrain your business and do something about them straight away – don’t ignore them.

That’s the business angle covered, but what about this as a piece of drama? Sharon's humility and slight nervousness meant that we all liked her from the outset and wanted her to succeed. We got a few tantalising glimpses of her own personal story – she's a single mother working 20 hours a day with a young daughter who is her "biggest fan" in a place which some might dismiss as a business backwater. She must have made a huge leap of faith to leave a good job to start up her business and was clearly facing an ongoing struggle to achieve a decent work/life balance.

Then there were the unanswered questions – where did she get the money to replace her salary, for patents and tooling? This added up to a dramatic and uplifting real life story told in 15 minutes.

TV doesn’t get much better than that!