Investor and ‘Dragon’ Deborah Meaden: ‘I am not mean. What I am is . . . tough’

Having lunch with a Dragon sounds like it should be a bloodthirsty affair, but here we run into a problem. Deborah Meaden is a vegan.

The 65-year-old British entrepreneur, investor and star of Dragons’ Den is equally famed for her fiery outbursts at hapless business owners pitching for financial backing on the cult BBC TV show as she is for favouring greener, eco-friendly business ideas. In recent years, her diet has followed suit.

We meet at The Newt, a Georgian country estate reborn as a boutique hotel set in the Somerset hills. Ushered in by a waistcoated flunkey, I find her sitting in the window seat of its Botanical Rooms restaurant perusing the vegan menu.

Our fellow diners are far too well-bred to come up and ask for a selfie, but it’s obvious from barely perceptible nods and glances they know we have a Dragon in our midst. Still, she is much smilier and chattier than her mean, green TV persona would have you believe.

“I am not mean,” she corrects me, frowning. “What I am is . . . tough. But I’m not hard.” About to start recording her 20th series of Dragons’ Den, she is excited that so many people dream of starting their own company but outspoken about the funding gap stifling the growth of British businesses.

Popular on the speaking circuit, she has the ear of much bigger international businesses too, including investment banks. The corporate world’s poor record when it comes to protecting nature makes her very angry indeed. So too does the lack of financial education in British schools. Her forthcoming money book for teenagers promises to prepare them for the adult world and inspire the business founders of the future.

Everyone asks if it’s our own money; it is our own money, and it is as close as you’re going to get on TV to watching a real investment deal happen

As picturesque as our surroundings are, The Newt — with its rolling acres of gardens and woodlands — is not a business Meaden would invest in. “It’s absolutely beautiful, it’s money-no-object . . . it’s what anybody would dream of doing if they were never looking at making a return on their money,” she says, smiling.

With a train strike about to begin, any hopes I had of using this as an excuse to stay the night are dashed by a quick Google in the loo: the cheapest room I can find here is £835 per night.

Our view over the croquet lawn is marred by the arrival of an uninvited guest: a wasp. I instinctively raise my arm, ready to swat it with the drinks menu. “You had better not kill it!” Meaden bellows in mock horror, summoning the waiter to help her ease open the sash window.

I steer the conversation back to safer ground by noting what good value for money the set menu offers with three courses for £45. She knows the rules mean the FT pays, but impishly inquires if she can choose what I eat. I politely refuse, but stop short of ordering the Somerset beef main, picking the sustainably sourced sea bream, and locally grown tomatoes to start with.

Meaden orders the Wye Valley asparagus as her starter, followed by the mushroom main. But we agree to share some vegan chips (cooked in non-beef fat) and to go halves on a vegan version of the forced Yorkshire rhubarb crumble.

She can’t have a tipple as she’s driving, but if she could, says she would have a No 3 Yarlington Mill Cyder (“it’s absolutely delicious”). Cider with a Y — what’s that about? An old West Country tradition to indicate that this is the good stuff, apparently. It certainly packs a punch at 5.7 per cent, and is served ice-cold in a wine glass.

Meaden finished formal education at 18 and went straight into business. Her background is in the leisure and hospitality industry (she once ran a Butlin’s bingo concession). Her parents had an amusement arcade business, where she worked, later expanding into the holiday park business with sites across South West England. Having led a management buyout in 1999, she made a successful exit to a private equity firm in 2007 that underpins her estimated net worth of £50mn.

An author of books about business and money, she has other business interests including a historic textile mill, and a portfolio of companies she’s invested in via the Den.

“Everyone asks if it’s our own money; it is our own money, and it is as close as you’re going to get on television to watching a real investment deal happen,” she says. Similar to US TV show Shark Tank, the grillings — which can be as long as three hours — are boiled down to just 10 minutes, and any deals struck are subject to due diligence. Other than the cameras, she says the only difference between this and non-televised pitches to angel investors is that the Dragons know nothing at all about the businesses in advance: “They want to see our reactions on camera.”

Meaden is not the richest Dragon, but this doesn’t bother her at all. One thing that makes her sad is the number of people she meets who don’t really know what they enjoy — and not just in a business sense.

“I’m thinking of someone now, I’m not going to name them, but they have loads of hobbies — you know, golf, tennis . . . they do loads of stuff. But I don’t think they enjoy it. I think they think that they have to do it.”

What does she enjoy? Obviously, investing in start-ups: “I love the creativity of taking a spark of an idea and turning it into something.” But as for hobbies? “Getting up early in the morning and going out for a ride. It makes me a much nicer person.”

Happiest in a pair of jodhpurs, she is not a starry person. None of her inspirations as an entrepreneur are famous people, but rather “ordinary people doing extraordinary things” with whom she has worked over her five decades in business.

Meaden is renowned for being the “Green Dragon” who grills business owners about how sustainable their moneymaking ideas might be, but going vegan isn’t the only change she’s made at a personal level. A few years ago, she decided to invest her pension into green funds. She admits the recent investment performance hasn’t been great but she’s definitely staying in.

“Green investing absolutely still works. It’s a maturing market, there’s a lot of new emerging technologies and a lot of new products, so the returns are slightly suppressed. But in the future, it’s absolutely the place to be.”

Governments may be watering down their net-zero commitments, but she argues that consumers — and by extension, retail investors — are much more worried about the future of the planet. Greenwashing has been an issue, but consumers are wise to this, and are not afraid of asking tough questions or moving their money elsewhere.

Any organisation that is not genuinely tackling not just climate change, but protecting the natural world, I promise you they are in trouble

She predicts that pressure on companies to demonstrate the impact their business activities are having on nature will be “much bigger than they think”.

“Any organisation that is not genuinely tackling not just climate change, but protecting the natural world, I promise you they are in trouble,” she says, sounding the most fired up she has all afternoon.

Noting the extent of public anger at the water companies polluting rivers and coasts, she thinks that her generation should be taking a much more activist stance about this. She saw a swallow as she was walking into the restaurant today, she says, but it was “the first one I’ve seen all summer. That makes the generation that remembers these things really, really important. We remember that abundance, while any young person today, their baseline comes from a reduced position. We need to do something about it because we can imagine things that the next generation can’t imagine.”

That’s not to say Meaden is a martyr to the green cause. She accepts that there is a green “transition” to be had for both companies and consumers.

“My measure is intent. Do these organisations mean it? Are they genuinely trying to transition? And have they got a baseline, are they measuring their journey? And as long as they’re on that journey, then I will forgive them if they transgress.”

She is the first to admit that making greener choices in our own lives is not black and white. Her recent Den investments include an EV charging business, yet she does not own an EV herself and is still driving her 20-year-old Porsche.

As she does less than 2,000 miles per year, she was told by none other than carbon footprint expert Mike Berners-Lee that it would be greener to keep it, given the amount of emissions that would go into making a new car.

Meaden’s home in Somerset is shared with her ever-expanding menagerie of (mostly rescued) animals including 11 sheep, three horses, five dogs, two cats and more than a dozen ex-battery hens who still lay abundantly. As our mains arrive, and she starts tucking into a bewilderingly large plate of cultivated mushrooms, I ask what she does with all of their eggs.

“I eat them,” she says, fixing me with an icy-blue stare, “but I won’t eat any other eggs.” This is a decision she has wrestled with, yet feels is the most common sense. “I am vegan for animal welfare and planetary reasons. I didn’t breed them in any way.”

Now on my second wine glass of cyder, I am emboldened to ask if one of the chickens died, would this be a free pass to a roast dinner? “No!” she replies, roaring with laughter. Instead, she leaves the dead chook at a safe distance as a meal for the foxes: “It’s the circle of life.”

As TV viewers well know, if there is one thing that riles Meaden, it’s business owners pitching for an investment who don’t have a firm grasp of their own numbers. This usually prompts her to say “Well, I’m out,” with a well-practised toss of the head.

Meaden insists the rivalry between the Dragons is real, and not put on for the cameras. She spots my attempts to get her to criticise her other famous co-stars a mile off, and is studiously polite about all of them.

“I try my best to win an investment, but if I don’t, I move on — there are going to be plenty of other opportunities.”

Her 70-year-old co-star Touker Suleyman irks her when he rejects investments by stating he’s never going to live long enough to see a return from them. Age hasn’t shifted her outlook or risk appetite. “I’m really lucky, I’m very healthy. I get to do all of the things that I want to do. I expect I’m going to live forever; I’m obviously not.” But like anyone else of pensionable age, she wants to get a good return from her investments — and when the cameras stop rolling, the tough persona endures.

What triggers her? Often, she says, the founder is the problem. Many only see the glamorous side of starting a business — and not the hard work required to get it going.

“Everybody thinks all they need is social media; that all you have to do is come up with an idea, then tell everybody about it with no thought of actually delivering the product.”

She accepts that influencing has become an industry in its own right, with serious money to be made and huge power to disrupt legacy businesses. This has made it the career path of choice for Gen Z who think they can get a TikTok account, spout their views to the world, and that will be it. “But some of them will [make] it,” she says, tacitly referencing her 31-year-old co-star Steven Bartlett who has successfully monetised his personal brand with an array of social media endorsements.

Being rich is not a thing, it’s an outcome of the things that you do . . . it’s not the endgame — the endgame is being able to do the things you want to do in life

He has a guest spot in her new book Deborah Meaden Talks Money that attempts to channel the entrepreneurial energy of TikTokers, with a chunky chapter devoted to starting a business. This includes practical tips on how to write a business plan and the importance of cash flow, or “why you can make a good profit, but still run out of money”. It never fails to surprise her how many much older business founders fail to learn this lesson.

As the waiter clears away our plates (leaving the last of the vegan chips) she tells me that teenagers she meets are full of ideas for new businesses. “I think it’s partly to do with wanting to build their own lives according to their values — that’s why I wanted to go into business. I’m fiercely independent. I wanted to make my own mistakes, and get the benefits from the things I got right.”

The book is a collection of short nuggets, rather than a dense read, tailored for the social media generation with the attention span of a gnat. She has an eye for a great fact, revealing that Taylor Swift’s first job was picking praying mantis pods from Christmas trees so they wouldn’t hatch in customers’ houses (I just hope she re-released them into the wild afterwards).

Outside the Den, it is very hard for established British entrepreneurs to win backing from banks or investors to scale up their businesses. “A big problem for the UK is the lack of support for small businesses wanting to scale,” she says, adding, “There is definitely a funding gap”.

British businesses with a turnover between £5mn-£10mn frequently fall into this rut, as they’re not big enough to attract venture capital funding, but too large for most angel investors.

She is sceptical about the chancellor’s Mansion House reforms that would force institutional investors to back British companies (“I think it’s the wrong way around”) but notes how tax breaks such as Enterprise Investment Schemes have helped to bolster the funding ecosystem, and hopes a future Labour government would continue and even expand this support.

“Who knows until they get in, but I like the fact that they are working really, really hard to engage with business — and that speaks more than any of the words they’re going to say.”

She has to zoom home in the Porsche to record a podcast, allowing me to finish the (surprisingly delicious) vegan rhubarb crumble. With a swish of her scarf, she rises to leave. But before she goes, in a world full of bling-touting influencers, what’s her pitch to the teens she hopes will buy her book?

The answer is building a better emotional relationship with money. “Being rich is not a thing, it’s an outcome of the things that you do . . . it’s not the endgame — the endgame is being able to do the things you want to do in life. And if you haven’t established what that is, all the money in the world is not going to make you happy.”

‘Deborah Meaden Talks Money’ is published on May 23 by HarperCollins Publishers

Claer Barrett is the FT’s consumer editor and host of the FT podcast ‘Money Clinic’

Want to talk to Claer on the show? Email money@ft.com or drop her a line on Instagram @Claerb. Sign up for Claer’s six-week email series, ‘Sort Your Financial Life Out With Claer Barrett’ here