BusinessWings: You fielded your idea to the panel of entrepreneurs — or ‘Dragons’ — on the BBC show Dragon’s Den to raise investment. How did you get on?
Charles Ejogo: On the day, very well: they made an offer of investment. However, about four months later the deal fell away.
One good thing about Dragon’s Den is that it really does give you exposure; no one would have heard of our business otherwise
Yet as soon as the programme went on air we were inundated with offers anyway, on much better terms than what the ‘Dragons’ had offered.
When you’re a start-up company it’s difficult to find the capital you need from the traditional route of bank finance. We also put these advert vans out into the Square Mile.
BW: An unorthodox way of raising finance – but was it successful?
CE: Yes, it was very effective. It was certainly very different.
We got a write-up in The Times, in City AM and in the Square Mile papers. We’re lucky — some of the banks came forward and said they’d offer us funding as well.
BW: So suddenly everyone wanted a piece…
CE: I think getting in front of investors is the difficult thing. One good thing about Dragon’s Den is that it really does give you exposure; no one would have heard of our business otherwise. It’s a shame you have to do these things to get public exposure, but that is the way it is: survival of the fittest.
BW: Are you still looking for investment?
CE: We’re pretty much done now. We have enough money to cover the business for the next three years.
Now it’s a question of getting as many machines out as we can, in accordance with our financial model. We already have 600 machines in the UK and machines in the US, New Zealand, France, Germany, Denmark and Holland.
BW: How did you come up with the idea?
CE: It was a long time ago now, about four or five years ago. I was on a train that stopped three or four stops away from where I lived.
It was the last train back to my house so I had to walk the rest of the way, in the rain. If I could have bought an umbrella I would have been fine; as it was I got soaked. It really just grew from that.
After that it took a long time to get things going as I was working full-time in the City. After leaving that job I decided to go full-time, and that’s when it developed into a proper business rather than just being an idea.
The business only properly got going last year. The year before we started putting machines out there, and the beginning of last year we started to push the roll-outs. And that’s what people don’t see: that it’s not an overnight thing, it takes time.
BW: You obviously raised a lot of capital to take Umbrolly to the next level, but what was the initial outlay to get it up and running?
CE: Having meetings with people and showing them your ideas — that’s pretty cheap. But when you want to set about designing a prototype machine and start buying umbrellas in bulk, it does get pretty costly.
Start-up costs were probably around £100k. That’s obviously not all in one go, but over the course of a year or so.
