Outside the Dragons’ den

It’s all in the editing, apparently. When Paul Tinton pitched his company Prowaste Management Services to the BBC’s five dragons in May, he faced a grilling under the lights at Pinewood Studios for an hour and a half non-stop. But when the programme was broadcast last month, the forensic questioning from five of the sharpest business brains was distilled into an 11-minute segment.

Tinton is seen taking questions confidently, figures at his fingertips and speaking the dragons’ language when he talks of Prowaste’s 12 months’ trading accounts and growing turnover. Its service of supplying sites with colour-coded wheelie bins to separate waste for recycling is hardly ground-breaking but combining it with a tender-to-completion project management service is an appealing package.

Deborah Meaden and Duncan Bannatyne are slowly won over and offer £100,000 to share 40% equity in the business – twice what Tinton and business partner Colin Slade had intended. Taking a deep breath, and calculating the hidden value of the dragons’ input to ‘two 28-year-olds from Surrey’, Tinton accepted.

Watching the show last month, Tinton was relieved that his business came across as a solid structure, and the message that waste recycling is a growing industry to go with a growing problem also hit home. ‘Small businesses have to appear bigger than they are to win credibility, so it mattered that we didn’t look like a total start-up,’ he says. ‘And with the drive to halve waste to landfill by 2012, it’s a good time to have a solution.’

Andrew Cunningham, however, who pitched his idea for applying designs and logos to hard hats – the trick is that they are made of double-walled plastic, with the design printed on the underside of the thin outer shell – feels he was edited into embarrassment. He claims that what was originally planned as eight minutes of TV footage were slashed to one – and that the rationale for his prospective business died on the cutting room floor.

The original version apparently included dragons’ comments that anyone with a creative urge could customise their hard hat with stickers or stencilling, assertions that he then told them were at odds with Health and Safety Executive guidance that hard hats should not come into contact with solvent-based adhesives and paints.

So while Cunningham argues that his innovation would be the first mass-produced hats to combine design flair and full HSE compliance, the broadcast version suggests he is peddling a product no-one needs.

Now, pride dented, he’s more determined than ever to get construction workers modelling his colourful headgear. ‘At one point I was going to walk away from it, but because I’ve been contacted by so many people who want to buy the hats or just to say they looked really good on the TV, it’s made me think I’ll prove the dragons wrong,’ says Cunningham, a serial entrepreneur and ex-Marine with a background in the demolition industry.

He may blame the black arts of media manipulation, but it’s true that the dragons tend to steer clear of ideas based on leaps of imagination and little market research. Conversely, it’s easy to see why Prowaste appealed: it was an established business-to-business company addressing a growing market driven by legislation.

At one point i was going to walk away but i’m going to prove the dragons wrong

Andrew Cunningham

And while no-one – least of all Tinton and Slade – would claim intellectual property rights on supplying colour-coded wheelie bins, the company had evolved an original service. ‘We’re not a skip service, we’re project managers when it comes to waste management. We know what’s going on week by week, so we feel like project partners – it makes a big difference,’ says Tinton. ‘We’ve got youth on our side, so we don’t take the accepted industry rules as standard.’

Prowaste’s success in taking a slice of the construction market ahead of established competitors – think of the waste sector’s mega-munchers such as Shanks, Biffa and Onyx – shows there is often room for a small company to exploit a niche. It’s a lesson other would-be-entrepreneurs in construction might want to emulate, says BRE’s Andrew Williams.

He heads the organisation’s Innovation Den, set up to help entrepreneurs submit patent-protected ideas to manufacturers and funding organisations. ‘It’s an active field – there are loads of investors out there,’ he explains. ‘The construction industry will go through a lot of changes in the next ten years, so there is demand for new ideas. And from an investor’s point of view, now is the time to invest – you want to be in the right position when the credit crunch comes to an end.’

Since May, Prowaste has been pursuing the expansion plans outlined in the den. It is looking to move its depot from Croydon to be closer to its central London clients and reduce its carbon footprint, increase its fleet of leased vehicles, and shift from the refurbishment market to new build.

The duo has met regularly with both dragons, and been happily surprised by the level of their commitment. Deborah Meaden in particular has shown a keen knowledge of the waste and recycling worlds, and made sure Prowaste’s website could cope with 155,000 hits the night the programme was broadcast. ‘She’s a lovely, lovely woman, and I’m not just saying that because she’s my new partner!’ says Tinton, keen to dispel Meaden’s image as the tight-lipped, tight-walleted dragon.

But most of all, the dragons’ involvement has helped mitigate the credit crunch. ‘It’s a difficult time for small businesses to be raising finance, but one of the biggest benefits of appearing on the programme is the banks’ attitude,’ he says. ‘With Deborah and Duncan on board, it makes a huge difference when you meet financiers.’

While Cunningham is trying to raise funding to mass-produce hard hats and build up other business interests, Tinton is preparing to grace our screens again. At the end of this month, the BBC will broadcast follow-up stories on each of the dragons’ investments.

Once again, it will be a chance for the unglamorous but increasingly vital world of waste recycling to reach a broad cross-section of the TV-watching public. ‘The publicity of Dragon’s Den is hugely important, for us and the wider industry. If we start making a noise and people start changing the way they manage waste on site, and it’s to do with the publicity we created, that’s hugely beneficial,’ Tinton concludes. cm