REFUSING an investment from the Dragons is normally a business death sentence, but for the Grumpy Gardener it was the making of them.
Father and son duo Mick and Joe Smith, 40, opted to not take any of the bids and now run a multi-million pound online gardening warehouse when they appeared on the BBC1 show in 2012.
Instead, the only thing they took from the show was their name Grumpy Gardener as Mick was branded grumpy by the show’s fans.
They were offered £50,000 for 50 per cent of their company by Duncan Bannatyne, but they weren’t prepared to sell more than 10 per cent of their firm.
Since appearing on the show, they have made £3million in a year with £300,000 worth of products sold in just 10 minutes on telly shopping channel QVC.
Joe said: “Turning down the Dragons is the best decision we have ever made. 100 per cent. The Dragons are obviously very successful people. They know what they are doing but we know that for every deal that is done, only every 3 handshakes come to fruition.
“The Dragons do their due diligence after the show and if that makes them not like you, you have to pay for the checks.
“So in theory you can be thousands of pounds in debt even after getting a handshake and that’s not how we wanted to start the business.
“Even though we did our two min pitch with the Dragons that you see. We were actually in that room for an hour and a half answering questions.
“People don’t see that side of it either. We think we did the best thing because we could plough our own fields and make our own mistakes.
“I don’t think we’d have done well with a dragon on board. We’re quite strong in our views
“Dragons’ Den portrayed my father as a bit cantankerous so we came up with the name The Grumpy Gardener and decided to invest in that caricature in a positive way.
“Mick has never seen the episode we were on because it clashed with Downton Abbey.”
The company now exports products to 27 different countries including China and several countries in the Middle East which adore their polar bear and snowmen solar powered statues.
Dad Mick has never seen their stint on the show, which he gained a grumpy reputation for, because it “clashed with Downton Abbey”.
They started the company with just £10,000 after each being left £5,000 in a will from their Great Uncle Peter , with Joe promising his dad he wouldn’t have to do any work.
The 40-year-old admits: “We had no experience of selling to the garden market place. I don’t think we even had any stock available by the time we arrived to do Dragons Den.
If we’d taken the offer we’d have folded within a year
“It was a bit stupid really. We only started the company with £5,000 each. I told dad if he invested the money he’d never have to do any work but that turned out to be a little bit of a lie.
“He’s still complaining to this day about working. He’s always at the warehouse and sometimes makes pretend go karts out of wheelbarrows to push the grandkids around in.”
Joe added: “If we’d taken the Dragon Den offer I’m almost certain we wouldn’t have lasted a year, let alone three.”
Their business is still family-operated and they often turn down orders because they simply do not have capacity.
Joe said: “Our company is still quite Faulty Towers-esq. My mother is an accountant and she turned round to me and my dad about a month or two ago and asked us if we knew how much we had turned over last year. We both said no and she told us it was £3million. My dad went “oh really” and carried on reading the paper.
“We just bumble along and seem to do alright. We work really hard. There’s four of us running this – myself, Mick, my wife Sarah who does design and my mum.”
Despite only having a small team, they can make tens of thousands in a minute thanks to contracts with telly shopping giants.
Online shopping has made business boom
Joe explained: “We mainly sell on mail order and television shopping channels. QVC take a lot of our stuff and they’re like the UK’s biggest garden centre.
“We started selling with them around 5 or six years ago and now we are one of their largest vendors in the UK. We do a lot with them in Canada and the USA.
“As covid has hit, if we’d have just dealt with garden centres and your John Lewis’s of the world, I honestly believe we’d have been bankrupt by now.
“We were lucky to fall into this mail order side of things because the pandemic has sent online and TV buying crazy.
“You just couldn’t beat it. We went to air with a season’s worth of plant pots last year and in 7 minutes we sold 16,000 of them.
“We’ve been on QVC USA quite a lot. It’s not uncommon to take 20,000 dollars a minute.
“We’ve had decent innovative ideas. We sell quite a lot of peanut butter bird food called NutPecker. When we put it online we sold 275,000 jars of it last year. That’s just through two outlets, QVC UK and Amazon.”
