RACHEL from DRAGONS DEN SPEAKS OUT about COVID FASCISM SEPTEMBER 2020
Former BBCTV Dragons’ Den ‘Dragon’, Rachel Elnaugh is the British entrepreneur who created the £multi-million market leading ‘Red Letter Days’ experience brand. She is now a business speaker, published author and award winning business mentor and is CEO of the digital publishing and marketing platform for evolutionaries www.source.tv
Rachel is based in Bakewell, Derbyshire, UK
Rachel Elnaugh is the award winning entrepreneur whose first business was the market leading ‘experiences’ brand Red Letter Days, which she created at the age of 24 and grew from nothing, on a shoestring budget, into a £multi-million turnover household name, which at its height was making £1million profit a year. In 2000 Red Letter Days was acknowledged by Mintel to be the creator of the new UK experiences industry – by then worth £250million per annum.
This won Rachel an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2002 and she was shortlisted for the 2001 Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year Award along with Barbara Cassani, Jo Malone, Sly Bailey and Chey Garland.
As a result of being on the Awards circuit, in 2002 she was invited by the BBC to be part of a new business show they were formulating called ‘Dragons’ Den‘.
The pilot for Dragons’ Den was filmed in 2003 and the first series was commissioned and filmed in Autumn 2004, airing for the first time in January 2005. Dragons’ Den was a huge success, shortlisted for a BAFTA and very quickly syndicated worldwide. The second series was filmed in May/June/July 2005 and aired in November/December 2005.
However, behind the scenes, Rachel had been struggling to bring Red Letter Days back on track after a disastrous over-expansion in 2002, and despite the business being back in profit and having £3.3million cash at bank it was forced into administration by Barclays Bank on 1 August 2005.
Thanks to her high profile appearance on Dragons’ Den, the crash of Red Letter Days attracted huge media exposure, the story appearing on all the key news channels and in every mainstream newspaper. (The Red Letter Days business was bought out of administration by Rachel’s fellow Dragons Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis and continues to trade.)
RACHEL from DRAGONS DEN SPEAKS OUT about COVID FASCISM SEPTEMBER 2020
