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TRANSCRIPTION WITH SPEAKERS
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[00:00] SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Canada's podcast.
[00:06] SPEAKER_00: Hi everyone, I'm Phil Bliss, a founder of Canada's podcast and I'd like to welcome you to our Canada's podcast Dragon's Den special.
[00:15] SPEAKER_00: Dragon's Den is going into its 17th season.
[00:18] SPEAKER_00: Canada's podcast and Dragon's Den are part of the to find three golden ticket, 60 second elevator video pitches for the new students.
[00:26] SPEAKER_00: We thought it would be great for you to hear from West Hall, founder and executive chairman of Kingsdale Advisors and the newest dragon to the den.
[00:35] SPEAKER_00: What is this a brilliant example of where successful entrepreneurship can take you?
[00:41] SPEAKER_00: Raised in Jamaica by his grandmother was immigrated to Canada when he was 16.
[00:46] SPEAKER_00: He really is a self-made Canadian success.
[00:50] SPEAKER_00: Maybe you can join him and begin your success story.
[00:53] SPEAKER_00: Take a listen to the podcast.
[00:55] SPEAKER_00: Give us your 60 second video pitch and who knows you might get to meet the dragons.
[01:01] SPEAKER_00: The best three elevator pitches will get a golden ticket to audition to the dragons den producers.
[01:08] SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
[01:10] SPEAKER_00: To go to Canada's podcast.com, blast Dragon's Den and make your pitch.
[01:15] SPEAKER_00: But now let's meet West Hall.
[01:19] SPEAKER_00: West, welcome to Canada's podcast.
[01:21] SPEAKER_00: Great to have you on.
[01:24] SPEAKER_00: And I don't think anyone listening and viewing Canada's podcast at some stage hasn't taken a look.
[01:34] SPEAKER_00: A long look.
[01:35] SPEAKER_00: A steady look at Dragon's Den kind of thing.
[01:38] SPEAKER_00: You're the newest to Dragon's Den.
[01:41] SPEAKER_00: You've done a full season.
[01:43] SPEAKER_00: What did you learn from it?
[01:47] SPEAKER_00: It must be such an experience.
[01:50] SPEAKER_01: Well, Phil, first of all, thank you for having me.
[01:54] SPEAKER_01: That is interesting.
[01:55] SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting question.
[01:57] SPEAKER_01: When did I learn?
[01:58] SPEAKER_01: Well, I learned how to do the television.
[02:02] SPEAKER_01: When you're an entrepreneur, you learn how to build a business.
[02:06] SPEAKER_01: That's what an entrepreneur does.
[02:08] SPEAKER_01: They start from the ground up and build a business.
[02:11] SPEAKER_01: And learning television is a little bit like that.
[02:14] SPEAKER_01: You get into a situation that you've never been in before.
[02:18] SPEAKER_01: And the first thing that you have to do is to talk to the veterans, the people who have done it before.
[02:23] SPEAKER_01: So I was able to talk to folks like Carlene.
[02:26] SPEAKER_01: And I spent a lot of time with her asking her about her journey on the show.
[02:32] SPEAKER_01: And as a result of listening to her and taking her advice, I was able to,
[02:37] SPEAKER_01: I guess, have a successful season to the point where they asked me to come back for another season.
[02:43] SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
[02:44] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's exciting.
[02:47] SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're in the investment side, so you know, it's not a new thing.
[02:51] SPEAKER_00: But, you know, seeing it or experiencing it and the dragons then kind of environment.
[02:59] SPEAKER_00: If you like, what makes a winning pitch in your mind?
[03:05] SPEAKER_00: A lot of things.
[03:07] SPEAKER_01: First of all, people have to really control their nerves because you may be very prepared when you get into the dead.
[03:14] SPEAKER_01: And as soon as the door is open and you walk in and the lights are on you, you just forget everything.
[03:21] SPEAKER_01: And you may have the best pitch in your mind ever.
[03:24] SPEAKER_01: But if you can't present it and you can't articulate your business plan in a proper way,
[03:30] SPEAKER_01: you're never going to get the dragons to invest in your company.
[03:34] SPEAKER_01: So what I would say to folks, Pitchin is just calm to breathe in down, first of all.
[03:42] SPEAKER_01: Well, what makes the picture winning pitch, I guess?
[03:45] SPEAKER_01: It's really about you being very prepared.
[03:48] SPEAKER_01: You know your numbers.
[03:49] SPEAKER_01: If you watch dragons then that you're finally show you realize that all they talk about initially are the numbers.
[03:58] SPEAKER_01: You come in and you say, here's my valuation.
[04:01] SPEAKER_01: And you put a number on the table.
[04:04] SPEAKER_01: And the fact of the matter is that you now have to justify the numbers based on how the business will do or has been doing.
[04:12] SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people say, I'm valuing the business based on what I'm going to do in the future.
[04:17] SPEAKER_01: That's a big, big mistake because you're asking the dragons to pay a value today based on what you're going to get in the future.
[04:26] SPEAKER_01: And so that's really overpaying for something.
[04:29] SPEAKER_01: So never walk into them and say to the dragons, I think my business were $10 million.
[04:36] SPEAKER_01: And you need to pay me that $10 million valuation on the business today.
[04:41] SPEAKER_01: That will not get you unless you have the most amazing idea.
[04:45] SPEAKER_01: But that general will not get you an investor.
[04:50] SPEAKER_00: Now I'm going to kind of just slip back to Canada's podcast.
[04:54] SPEAKER_00: You know you've had an interesting journey from Jamaica and Canada and building yourself up as an entrepreneur and now as an investor.
[05:03] SPEAKER_00: We can still entrepreneur.
[05:04] SPEAKER_00: He's a big investor.
[05:06] SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know about you, but without mentorship on the way, I would have been lost to be that.
[05:15] SPEAKER_00: What sort of, I guess, what's that thing you've learned from a mentor that you can carry around in your back pocket and it never goes away?
[05:26] SPEAKER_01: Really about not giving up.
[05:29] SPEAKER_01: When you're an entrepreneur, you get knocked down all the time.
[05:34] SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of people saying no to you.
[05:36] SPEAKER_01: A lot of people say no to you.
[05:37] SPEAKER_01: If you ask 100 people for something, probably 98 of them will say no.
[05:44] SPEAKER_01: And it's very difficult when people keep on saying no.
[05:48] SPEAKER_01: Or people just not believe in what you have created, especially when you're creating something brand new.
[05:53] SPEAKER_01: When I started Kingsdale Advisors, for example, that business, the way that I wanted to build it, didn't really exist before.
[06:01] SPEAKER_01: And could you imagine going to all the financial institutions in the country and ever single one of them who are professional loners, by the way?
[06:08] SPEAKER_01: It loaned money to fund business entrepreneurs for a living.
[06:15] SPEAKER_01: And when ever single one of them told me no, we're not going to support that idea.
[06:20] SPEAKER_01: It suggests that that maybe is a bad idea because they're professionals.
[06:26] SPEAKER_01: But I didn't listen to the professionals because I've got advice over the years from folks who say,
[06:32] SPEAKER_01: you have to believe in yourself.
[06:35] SPEAKER_01: And you have to the first investment that you need to make is in yourself.
[06:41] SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people don't do that when somebody is saying no to them.
[06:46] SPEAKER_01: They forget that their goal is to invest in themselves and to believe in themselves.
[06:51] SPEAKER_01: So as having mentors as an entrepreneur is absolutely critical because you need someone to pat you in the back when you're doing well,
[07:00] SPEAKER_01: but you also need people to stop you and say, you know what, you're going in the wrong direction and get you refocused.
[07:06] SPEAKER_01: And if you don't have those people around you, you're going to make a lot of mistakes very early.
[07:11] SPEAKER_01: And those mistakes could be catastrophic for you as an entrepreneur and it could end your journey.
[07:17] SPEAKER_00: We've gone through a fairly life altering two and a half years.
[07:23] SPEAKER_00: Okay.
[07:24] SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I was interested to know, you know, taking that, taking the last 24 months into account,
[07:34] SPEAKER_00: the very specific industries or products that you want to invest in.
[07:41] SPEAKER_00: You see as being, you know, very viable over the next three to five years.
[07:48] SPEAKER_01: One of the things that I'm looking at right now that's fairly large is a biotech,
[07:54] SPEAKER_01: a pharmaceutical, a manufacturing facilities.
[07:58] SPEAKER_01: One of the things that we've learned, for example, when we're trying to get vaccines from different parts of the world, what happened?
[08:05] SPEAKER_01: Shipments were delayed, shipments were redirected to different parts of the world because they had the repayment of money for different reasons, right?
[08:13] SPEAKER_01: And as a result of that, we saw in Canada where we're just sitting there, waiting and praying that we'd get our shipment of vaccine,
[08:22] SPEAKER_01: because there's a shortage of facilities in the world.
[08:26] SPEAKER_01: So, one of the goals of mine is really to invest in a facility or multiple facilities.
[08:33] SPEAKER_01: Not only here in Canada, but also especially in places like the Caribbean.
[08:38] SPEAKER_01: And what it does is really create high-paying jobs, high-paying opportunities for people in those regions.
[08:44] SPEAKER_01: We can plan an important, for example, the University of West Indies to be able to have those students who are capable and qualified.
[08:52] SPEAKER_01: But right now, when they graduate, they have really nothing much to do other than to go into the hospitality industry and to work for low wages.
[08:59] SPEAKER_01: We can create great opportunities for those folks if we bring facilities like those.
[09:04] SPEAKER_01: But the fact of the matter is that the world will continue to need those facilities.
[09:09] SPEAKER_01: And they're usually, they're going to need it at a moment's notice, just like we did during COVID.
[09:14] SPEAKER_01: So, I see the less than I learned coming out of that is, what does the world really need?
[09:18] SPEAKER_01: And how can we create that need? And that's one of them.
[09:23] SPEAKER_00: Now, you just went through your first season.
[09:25] SPEAKER_00: Is it a favorite picture or a deal from last season?
[09:31] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, my favorite pitch was this young fellow that walked into the den.
[09:36] SPEAKER_01: He was fairly young and he was built very nicely. He had great, great muscles.
[09:42] SPEAKER_01: And I'm, I said, they're going, I hope he's going to say something very smart when he come in here and he walked into the den.
[09:50] SPEAKER_01: And he can tell that he was nervous, but he was really well prepared.
[09:54] SPEAKER_01: And he really reminds me of myself when I started Kingsdale.
[09:56] SPEAKER_01: I was 34 when I started Kingsdale. I wasn't as handsome as he was.
[10:01] SPEAKER_01: But I started Kingsdale 34 and I remember being nervous in my first pitch to a client to try to get their business.
[10:09] SPEAKER_01: And I hit the ball of the park and I got a deal and here I am, I'm here today still.
[10:14] SPEAKER_01: That's what this young gentleman did. He came into the den.
[10:18] SPEAKER_01: He answered all the questions, dragons were thrown at him.
[10:22] SPEAKER_01: And Michelle is a tech person. Michelle was just throwing all kinds of tech questions at him.
[10:27] SPEAKER_01: And he was just knocking them out of the park.
[10:30] SPEAKER_01: And I just saw myself in this young man and I go, that's somebody that I can see myself mentoring.
[10:36] SPEAKER_01: Because he can tell that he puts the work in and he will put the work in to be successful.
[10:42] SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I got the investment with him and it's closed and I'm very excited to be working with him.
[10:47] SPEAKER_01: That's terrific.
[10:48] Speaker UNKNOWN:
[10:49] SPEAKER_00: On the other side of it, you know, one of the some of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when pitching,
[10:56] SPEAKER_00: that really kind of just make it hard for them to get to the next level.
[11:02] SPEAKER_01: Assuming that the dragons don't really know anything about their business and they just take liberties that they shouldn't.
[11:11] SPEAKER_01: These dragons have done so many things and they have so much to offer.
[11:18] SPEAKER_01: And sometimes people come into the den, just treat that expertise with this regard.
[11:28] SPEAKER_01: And the way that they respond to questions is almost like, you know, why would you ask me that question?
[11:35] SPEAKER_01: It's almost like they just feel that it's obvious what we're here for.
[11:39] SPEAKER_01: It's obvious that I you should give me your money.
[11:41] SPEAKER_01: It's obvious that my product is the best thing since sliced bread.
[11:44] SPEAKER_01: What's wrong with you people? How could you not see that?
[11:47] SPEAKER_01: Anyone coming with an arrogant attitude like that, I've never ever seen them close a deal.
[11:53] SPEAKER_01: Because the way that you project yourself in the den is how you will likely be as a partner.
[11:59] SPEAKER_01: And if you're one of those individuals who don't really take advice, you don't listen to your have your own way doing things.
[12:03] SPEAKER_01: They don't really care about others. You don't need a partner.
[12:07] SPEAKER_01: You need to be a sole purport partner.
[12:09] SPEAKER_01: You need to be an entrepreneur with not getting other people's money in your business.
[12:13] SPEAKER_01: Because once you start taking other people's money, there's accountability.
[12:17] SPEAKER_01: And if you show yourself to be not accountable in the den, chances are you're probably not going to get a deal in the den.
[12:25] SPEAKER_00: So, you know, let's go back to this sort of, let's conclude.
[12:29] SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a good point.
[12:34] SPEAKER_00: Driving was then being around for so many seasons.
[12:38] SPEAKER_00: You know, coming up on 17 season.
[12:41] SPEAKER_00: You know, it's amazing.
[12:43] SPEAKER_00: Why do you say people keep coming back?
[12:47] SPEAKER_00: You know, why are you still the top show?
[12:50] SPEAKER_00: And I mean that top show.
[12:53] SPEAKER_01: I actually was wondering the same thing myself until I got on the show.
[12:58] SPEAKER_01: And then I have, my wife and I have five kids.
[13:03] SPEAKER_01: We go to 26 year old.
[13:04] SPEAKER_01: He watches this show with his friends.
[13:06] SPEAKER_01: We have a 23 year old.
[13:09] SPEAKER_01: He watches the show with his friends.
[13:11] SPEAKER_01: We have a daughter, 21.
[13:13] SPEAKER_01: She watches the show with her friend.
[13:15] SPEAKER_01: We have a 17 year old daughter watches the show with her friends.
[13:19] SPEAKER_01: We have 11 year old son who watches the show with his friends.
[13:24] SPEAKER_01: And I have colleagues at work and business partners that watches the show with family.
[13:32] SPEAKER_01: And how many shows do you know that transcend that many age groups?
[13:39] SPEAKER_01: And they're talking about, what did you see what the dragon did?
[13:42] SPEAKER_01: Or did you see what the dragon said to the sky?
[13:45] SPEAKER_01: That's what my love and girl will come home and said, oh, my friend was saying, dad, you did this.
[13:49] SPEAKER_01: And you said that that was great.
[13:50] SPEAKER_01: And they didn't watch the show because his dad was on the show.
[13:54] SPEAKER_01: They're fans of the show.
[13:55] SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting, my first episode, one of the Aaron a tool.
[14:01] SPEAKER_01: It was great because he sent me a nice note because he sent me a picture of him and his daughter watching Dragon Show.
[14:09] SPEAKER_01: Because he's like, that's our favorite show.
[14:12] SPEAKER_01: And that's the beauty of it is because why everybody picture themselves being an entrepreneur.
[14:19] SPEAKER_01: Everyone.
[14:19] SPEAKER_01: Like from a young 11 year old kid with the lemonade stand, I'm going to sell lemonade.
[14:25] SPEAKER_01: I'm going to give the money to charity or whatever the case may be.
[14:28] SPEAKER_01: Everybody to picture themselves being an entrepreneur and being on the show is a way to say, hey, I want to pitch these guys one day to get money.
[14:36] SPEAKER_01: It's an entrepreneur.
[14:38] SPEAKER_00: Entrepreneurship is multi-generational.
[14:41] SPEAKER_00: That's, it doesn't get put into a pocket.
[14:44] SPEAKER_00: That's great.
[14:46] SPEAKER_00: That's really it.
[14:48] SPEAKER_00: You know, it's been a great little chat.
[14:51] SPEAKER_00: I really enjoyed meeting Wes and Ellen, certainly looking forward to the new season.
[14:55] SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure some of the people listening here will dive in and get experience.
[15:01] SPEAKER_00: And maybe maybe put their pitches in and hope for the best.
[15:05] SPEAKER_01: Well, that's what we're hoping, right?
[15:07] SPEAKER_01: We, there are so many people out there with great ideas in their head.
[15:12] SPEAKER_01: And they're nervous about what to do with that idea.
[15:14] SPEAKER_01: And I encourage them.
[15:15] SPEAKER_01: I really do.
[15:16] SPEAKER_01: I encourage them to do a addition for the show.
[15:20] SPEAKER_01: A addition for it could be very surprised that it's not as bad as you think.
[15:25] SPEAKER_01: Television is not as bad as you think.
[15:27] SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed it.
[15:28] SPEAKER_01: I think people who everybody that have met with come on the show absolutely enjoy it.
[15:33] SPEAKER_01: But just come on.
[15:34] SPEAKER_01: At a minimum, what it will do is get exposure for what you're trying to do, even if you don't get a deal.
[15:40] SPEAKER_01: Okay.
[15:41] SPEAKER_00: Thanks for coming on.
[15:42] SPEAKER_00: Kind of spot cast will be it will be will be following it as usual and you know, great meeting.
[15:50] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks for the pleasure.
