Events students pitch in Dragons Den to CEO

Page published: 2 May 2012

Events Management students pitch Dragons Den style presentations to the CEO of Beales department stores.

Events management students were challenged to a Dragons Den style entrepreneurial presentation on Tuesday 24 April, fighting for the ‘investment’ of Tony Brown CEO of Beales department stores.

Other Dragons included Events Management Programme leader Pearl Morrison and Miguel Moital, Senior Lecturer in Events Management.

There were four presentations throughout the morning, each trying to impress Tony Brown to be awarded the best business idea to suit Beales, £100 worth of vouchers and a day shadowing the CEO himself at work.

The first group proposed a ‘Toytastic’ ticketed event, which did impress the Dragons, although they were criticised for using inaccurate marketing and advertising costs, and not using enough digital marketing.

Francesca Gorvin, a student from the ‘Toytastic’ group said after her presentation “I think it went really well and we had a few issues with group dynamics in the year, so think that now that has been resolved I think it was a good turn out and it has been received well by the dragons.”

Other presentations included a ‘Gourmet junk food’ event, which would feature a celebrity chef teaching students how to cook healthy typical junk food meals, focusing on discounted cooking equipment, ‘Beales be beautiful’ a complimentary focused fashion and beauty event, and ‘Beales Olympics’ focused on using the Xbox kinect to hold Olympic based competitions in store.

Tony described the presentations as ‘very innovative’ and will probably use ‘some aspect of all of them’.

He also gave some practical advice to the students, saying “I think it would be useful for students to get involved in the real commerciality of what businesses do to understand the rationale about what stands behind it and the real costs, as that’s the bit that I think most groups have missed.”

After all the tough pitching and stiff competition Tony declared each team a winner, stating the ideas were all so innovative he could see them all working in the store, promising to duplicate the voucher money for each team.

Dragon Pearl Morrison said “the students did so well Tony Brown couldn’t choose the best one which is phenomenal really, so we are really proud that they have come on from the journey from their tour around Beales to standing up in our board room at Bournemouth University today and doing their presentations.”