Featured Image Credit: BBC
Topics: Money, TV and Film, Deborah Meaden
Aisha Nozari
Nothing gets the heart thumping quite like watching people’s dreams get roasted by a team of billionaire British business titans.
But not all contestants are doomed to fail; did you know that Peter Jones was once so bowled over by a contestant’s net worth that he practically offered him a place on the judging panel? Because, yep, that’s actually a thing that happened. See for yourself below:
Cast your minds back to 2017, when entrepreneur Andrew Pearce appeared on the show to plug his burgeoning online greetings card company.
Pearce ended up securing funding from two Dragons, but it was Jones’s reaction to Pearce’s eye-watering wealth that really made the episode memorable.
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When asked by Jones how much he’d spent so far on developing Thortful, the card company in question, Pearce left the Dragons flabbergasted when he declared: “To date we’ve spent about £1.5million pounds.”
Realising this wasn't Pearce’s first rodeo, Jones then said: “Andrew, I’m now completely intrigued. Where did you get that money from?”
Pearce replied: “Basically I’ve run my own businesses before. About the age of 21 I set up my first business, which was an outsourced call centre. We sold that for £12.1million [and I made] £6million.”
He went on: “And then after that, I thought, ‘Why don’t we try some conference calling?’”
Jones then interjected, saying: “So you did that, and what did you sell that business for?”
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“Sold that for about £37million. [I made] about £15million.”
Clearly impressed by Pearce, Jones told him: “You’ve made £21million, and clearly you are a mega entrepreneur. No question about it. You should be sitting here.”
Pearce humbly responded: “Not quite yet.”
The footage was recently reposted on social media and people were seriously impressed with Pearce’s down-to-earth attitude.
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One person wrote: “‘Not quite yet’ is exactly why he's so successful,” while a second echoed: “‘Not quite yet’, that shows the confidence that he will be sitting [on the panel] in [the] future.”
A third person wrote: “‘Not quite yet!’ Millionaire and humble above all!”
Other comments included: “I like how he seems apprehensive to talk about his clear success. Stuttering nervously instead of flaunting arrogance which in his case would have been fairly understandable. Good sign of humility and grounding making the dragons noticeably more intrigued” and “You know he's a beast when even with all that success he's looking for more knowledge and experience to be worthy of such a position.”