Archive for the ‘Media Training’ Category
We hate Being Told We’re FAT!
One of the most talked about issues this summer has been the Stop the Spread Campaign from Safe Food, the State’s public health promotion and monitoring unit. Safe Food has boldly stated that two out of three of us are unhealthily overweight. In previous summers when they spent tax payers’ money politely and meekly telling us to make sure we cooked the food thoroughly on the barbeque, they were great folks.
But this year they have had the audacity to tell us to measure ourselves around the middle and for women, if you are over 32 inches, or men over 37 inches, this indicates you are probably harming your health through being chronically overweight.
Some journalists have questioned the one measurement fits all approach sanctioned by the WHO, the World Health Organisation. But is this further proof of our denial. Do we simply hate to be told we are FAT?
When the WHO recently pronounced that mobile phone use is injurious to our health not one journalist questioned it. But because we are in denial about our weight some of the journalists have even questioned the independence of the WHO.
So let’s be clear what the WHO says, and in turn, what safe Food is promoting. They are asking us all to measure around our middle. That is not what we commonly call our waistline. So, measure around your middle at your navel or bellybutton. If a woman measures more than 32inches or a man measures more than 37 inches, that means there is an indication that your belly is protruding because so much fat has already built up around your heart, lungs and intestine that on top of that it is now forcing your tummy to protrude.
Now we can continue to deny it all day and all night long but they are the facts according to the WHO. With that much excess fat around your internal organs you are more likely to suffer coronary disease, diabetes or cancer. One third of all cancers are weight related.
But because of our state of denial we start claiming, “I have heavy bones” or “I retain a lot of water”. When the WHO stated brain tumours can result from excessive use of a mobile phone no one was daft enough to say “but I have heavy bones, my skull has an above average thickness so the electro-magnetic field won’t get through my thick head as much”. However these are the very arguments many of us use to resist accepting the fact that we are overweight.
Unbeknownst to ourselves our nation and our children are getting fatter and fatter. Safe Food has stuck to its guns and told us to measure ourselves as instructed. It is merely an indicator and if you are over the 32 or 37 inches but you believe you are not overweight, the best thing to do is to go to your Doctor and get that verified. If your doctor, who will also take into consideration your age, fitness, height etc, tells you you’re not overweight isn’t that fantastic! Keep up the good work but don’t attack a public health agency when it is merely trying to draw our attention to a serious and costly health issue for our population.
Senator Norris – Dead Man Walking
This week Senator David Norris is addressing County Councils seeking their nominations for him to contest the Presidency. He hasn’t a hope. Politically he is now a dead man walking and he only has himself to blame. His appallingly poor judgment and disastrous media strategy have ruined his campaign which, only a fortnight ago, looked so promising. A Liveline, RTE Radio One, tele’-poll then had him way ahead at 41%.
Constitutionally the office of The President is above politics and must not take policy positions. David Norris demonstrated, beyond doubt, that he cannot help himself when it comes to expressing an opinion even if it is going to destroy his ultimate objective. Does anyone actually believe he could go for seven years in the Aras without expressing a single controversial opinion?
Further his campaign demonstrated appallingly poor media judgement. The worst type of president we could have is one who doesn’t have the wit to realise when he or she is in really big trouble and graciously reverse. But not Senator Norris, he should have immediately apologised for his 2002 Magill and 2010 Irish Mail reported comments, stating that he should not have allowed himself say something so ambiguous and so open to misinterpretation. Instead David Norris ploughed on and over the cliff.
He stoutly defended his position by condemning paedophilia but apparently condoning pederasty. So what is the actual definition of the word “pederasty”. Dictionary.com offers three definitions as follows;
1. Sexual relations between two males, especially when one of them is a minor.
2. Homosexual relations between men and boys.
3. And it offers a Medical Definition as – anal intercourse especially with a boy as the passive partner.
This raises the question what is the difference between pederasty and (sexually) “grooming” a boy aged thirteen to sixteen? Clearly Senator Norris’s stance raised more questions than it answered and so his hopes of becoming President effectively ended by his own doing last week on Morning Ireland.
World’s Most Famous Heads of State in Ireland.
The Queen has arrived and so too has a milestone in the process of reconciliation between our two countries. I warmly welcome the British Head of State and believe her visit is long overdue.
I am very privileged to be meeting both Queen Elizabeth and President Obama at functions I will attend in the next few days. The Queen’s itinerary has been published but the final details of President Obama’s visit is a ferociously well guarded secret.
In a professional capacity I am working the members of Moneygall community. Normally this too should have stayed secret until Ollie Hayes the publican in Moneygall told RTE’s John Murray on his radio show last Friday morning. Now everyone knows, thanks Ollie.
Anyway what is my role? For Henry Healy, a relative of Barak Obama who lives in Moneygall, for John Donovan, who owns the ancestral home and for Canon Stephen Neil, the genealogist who established the link between County Offaly and the US President, next Monday is monumentous. These three men will each be interviewed over a thousand times by the world’s media between, say, Saturday and Wednesday next.
I don’t think people have any idea how big an international story this is. My team and I will be on the ground in Moneygall to help them cope with the media tsunami that is about to hit them. It is important that the spokespersons in Moneygall do themselves, their village and Ireland justice. It will be a fantastic few days for Ireland having the two most widely recognised heads of state in the world meeting the warm and friendly people of Ireland and pictures of it all beamed around the world on TV.
As a result of my involvement I have been invited to attend an “intimate function” with the US President but if I told you the details of that here now his secret service would have to shoot me so I will tell you all about it in my next bog update!
Marketing and how much money do you need to push sales?
What do you want to do with the money I’d Invest?
Every week on Dragons’ Den people ask for an amount of money and they are always asked by the Dragons what are they going to do with it? Inevitably it falls into two big chunks, stock and marketing. So they will say, for example, they want €100,000 and they will say €50,000 of this is for marketing. For launching a national product €50,000 won’t get you very far, but the big bonus of the Den is that you get a national TV launch and priceless publicity for you and your product.
On last Thursday’s show we had Peter in the Den with his paint brush holder. I found it very revealing that he found out after the launch of the product that he didn’t have enough money from sales to market it.
Here’s the secret formula
You need to have a product which you can make for about one-tenth of what you will sell it for wholesale.
So with every idea you look for two things – is this product going to achieve a premium consumer price, and can it be manufactured for very little? A good example of this is a board game. They sell for somewhere between €29 and €34, but in mass production they can be made for less than one euro!
Animatazz
In the first series I invested in Animatazz, the global rights to which we have now sold to Drumond Park. This UK company will manufacture it for about a €1 and will pay us - Michael Connolly, the inventor and I, the investor - a royalty of just under a euro. It will be sold to Argos at perhaps €10. On every kit they will add a further €3 for advertising and marketing.
So each kit will cost Drummond Park about €5. They will sell it to Argos for €10 and Argos will sell it in their catalogue for €16. The figures are very rough, and of course we should be talking sterling, but I am just trying to give you an idea of the numbers. If Argos places an order of 40,000 units, then Drumond Park will spend €120,000 on marketing. That’s how it works.
I want to know what is the cheapest price to manufacture
When people come into the Den, I often ignore what they say about marketing because they usually haven’t a clue. I tend to ask what is the very lowest price their product can be manufactured at? Then I ask what is the top price a consumer might pay for it? (You will read later on that Eamonn Treacy and Bin Trasher will only be sold off their web site, because if the product went into Dunnes Stores or Woodies it could be too expensibe by the time the retailer got its margin)
Watch out for cosmetics.
They are a marketing persons dream. The stuff that goes in the bottle is very cheap. It might cost as little as €1, but could sell in a shop for €30 or €40. So on a product like that you have plenty of room to earn the money to spend on marketing. Watch out. If a product like that comes into the Den in this series I will be very interested.
One Week Closer to the Recovery…
Good Morning, the start of another week and a week closer to the recovery that will emerge in our economy. None of us are sure will it even get worse before it gets better but the inevitability of the economic cycle means we will recover. When? No one actually knows, the only definite thing is we get closer to it every day. For most businesses the goal for the rest of this year is to stay in the game, hold your breath and tread water.
In advance of Programme 2 this Thursday at 10:15pm on RTE 1 here are some tips about pitching a business idea.
How to Pitch
This is the question I am most asked by people with business ideas or an invention. What is the best way to pitch or present it?
In fact this is how I came to the whole world of venture capital. I used to coach people who were about to make pitches. Enterprise Ireland asked to about ten years back to do workshops for their HPSUs, that’s, High Potential Start Ups. When the dotcom boom came along I found myself working with a lot of nerds with high tech’ ideas. It was Hi Tech but a low, low standard of presentation. Rather than just coach them I then started to invest a little for a slice of action in the better ones and I had an almost 100% success rate. Then people started coming looking for me.
The Dos and Don’ts of a Good Investor Presentation
There are key elements to a successful pitch and for the life of me I can never understand how people leave them out. It happens all the time in the Den also.
What is the ROI?
Don’t be fixated with explaining your idea or proposition. Your emphasis should be on the ROI, the return on investment. It is not that you are looking for €100,000 that is important but rather what the potential investor will make, say, €600,000 from the investment in the next 3 or 5 years.
Here’s the golden rule. If you want an investor to put money in you have got to tell them when, how and how much they will get back. It is referred to in venture capital as the EXIT. Sadly you will see in this second series of Dragons’ Den hardly any of those pitching in the Den offered a clear and credible exit strategy. BIG MISTAKE
So your pitch should consist of, best in this order;
- Idea/Concept
- Route to market
- EXIT & ROI
- Solid Sales Forecast.
Avoid Chinese Glove Syndrome
Finally in dos and don’ts let me address the other frequent mistake, the absence of a Solid Sales Forecast. If there is one thing I hate in a pitch it is, what we call in venture capital, “Chinese Glove Syndrome”.
In the 80s Michael Jackson popularised wearing just one glove. So let’s sell a single glove to everyone in China. That’s more than a billion gloves and we will make one euro on every glove and we will be billionaires.
It is absolute madness but that’s what people always do. And their stupid accountants put this in business plans. Last week Herbie Porsche, what a name, had the idea for a Toilet Pipe Cover. Now he didn’t even have a business plan but he had an ingenious idea. But people get carried away. Imagine if Herbie had gone on with the following poppycock the style of which you hear in almost every pitch these days. “There are 220 million toilets in the UK of which 55% have a soil pipe going into the floor and if we capture only 5% of that market selling our Toilet Pipe Cover to each of them at a profit of £3 sterling, means we will end up with profits of £363m or a cool Four Hundred Million Euro.” Absolutely bonkers but that is the type of thinking people bring to forecasts.
Give an Investor your Solid Sales Forecast
The alternative and what investors want to hear is Solid Sales Forecasts. We have spoken to X retailer and they said they could sell 7,000 units this year. If that can be backed up with an order or a letter giving even half of a commitment it will impress and is so much better than the Chinese Glove approach.
Talk to you next immediately after Thursday Night’s Show
My next Blog Update is Thursday at 11:15pm when I will give you the inside story on the pitches that appear on Thursday night. I can tell you it is a great show and watch out, Sarah may be about to make an investment or does one of the other Dragons swipe it out from under her nose?
Also below is the article Herbie had in Yesterday’s Sunday Independent.