A businessman who appeared on Dragons’ Den has shared his astonishing turn of fortune from financial ruin to owning a multimillion-dollar company.
Derry Green featured in series 21, episode two of the BBC reality series, which sees entrepreneurs vie for an investment from our titular dragons: Deborah Meaden, Peter Jones, Touker Suleyman, and Steven Bartlett.
The star had been facing ‘financial ruin’ at the start of the Covid pandemic when his European transport business had all its work cancelled overnight.
Soon after, he set up his business, The Secret Garden Glamping, which started as a glamping pod he built for his children during Covid, which went viral, inundating him with requests to use it.
‘I was on universal credit, we had a mortgage payment break, I had no money coming in. I had nothing to lose,’ he recalled about taking the plunge and listing his glamping pod on Airbnb, before making the first six himself.
A handful of years later, business has boomed, and he now offers glamping retreats for customers at locations across the UK and Ireland.
Then, in 2023, a hopeful Derry walked into the pit to pitch his already-thriving business to see if he could build his glamping empire even further.
Not only did Derry leave the show with a £100,000 investment from Deborah Meaden (after offers from several of the business tycoons), but even just appearing on national TV was enough to boost his business wealth to unexpected new heights.
Just two weeks after his episode aired in January 2024, the company had generated an additional £500,000 in bookings, as he told the Naked Founder podcast.
Dragons Den success stories
In fact, the sheer impact of appearing on the show totally took him aback.
He said: ‘I thought it would be me on my phone for maybe one or two days before the next episode was on and it would calm down. It was six months before it calmed down and even then, it still never stops.;
His annual turnover has since inflated from £500k to £2m, with 47 employees and five nationwide sites under his belt.
What makes his tale even madder is that he acknowledged he didn’t even need to go on Dragons’ Den in the first place, but decided to go for it anyway.
He continued: ‘If I’m totally honest I didn’t go on Dragons’ Den for money because we didn’t need it and I didn’t go for advertising because we didn’t really need it.
‘What I wanted was somebody else to tell me I was doing the right thing.’
Since Dragons’ Den, his company has made even more onscreen cameos, including in shows like Four in a Bed and Celebs Go Dating.