When the ninth series of the BBC's Dragons' Den hit our screens in July, the producers could have been forgiven for being slightly more apprehensive than usual.
A worsening economic situation coming hot on the heels of a major recession was hardly the ideal backdrop for a programme designed to encourage risk-taking entrepreneurism, while even the show's biggest fan would have to admit that the line-up had gone slightly stale after four series with no change in dragon personnel.
On that front, at least, they needn't have worried. Hilary Devey's arrival in the den in place of the rather placid James Caan gave the show a new impetus and was a major factor - along with the new Sunday night format - in the record viewing figures of 4.3 million achieved for the opening episode.
The 54-year-old entrepreneur herself wasted no time in making her presence felt. At the time of writing there have been just three episodes shown and only one investment - Liz and Alan Colleran's camping mattress/duvet creation, in which she took a 26% stake for £80,000 - to report, but her blend of frankness and mild manners both scared and charmed viewers in equal measure.
Her treatment of one hapless individual who had made the schoolboy error of failing to know his financials before pitching to the five investors - "I'm not amused, I'm angry, I'm out" - has been the highlight of the series to date, in what was the most dramatic arrival since the now tame Deborah Meaden first breezed on to our screens back in 2006.
Devey says she was first approached to appear on Dragons' Den two years ago - begging the question of just who the BBC thought might be leaving - but was unable to accept due to having already committed to take part in Channel Five's The Business Inspector.
"They asked me again at the end of last year and I relished the opportunity," she says. "I wanted to diversify my business portfolio and I've invested in several during the series. Most of these are still undergoing due diligence, which is a long and arduous process, but I'm sure we'll reach heads of terms with at least three of them very shortly."
Despite her impressive start in the den, Devey says it took her around a week and half of filming before she felt comfortable around contemporaries Duncan Bannatyne, Theo Paphitis, Peter Jones and Meaden. "I'd never met any of them before; my first day was like being back at school," she says. "I'm not naturally a shy person but I was very quiet that first day. The first week was awful. I didn't know when to interject when they were pitching. I've done television shows by myself and that's far easier than working with a panel.
"But when I found my feet I thoroughly enjoyed it," she adds. "There was lots of banter going on with the other dragons; it's a very competitive environment. I lost some of the pitches because I was a newbie and an unknown dragon and I thought "damn, I could have done wonders with that". But some you win and some you lose; that's business. You just have to get on with it."
Seeing a succession of entrepreneurs come into the den only served to underline Devey's belief as to why so many start-ups fail. "A lot of people have a brilliant concept but they're not prepared to put in the self-sacrifice that is required in any business," she says.
"The other reason is because there's no route to market. They have this product and think it's fantastic but it takes someone on the outside to say "well, hang on, who is going to sell that, how do you get that to market and how much is it going to cost". I saw this time and time again in the den; there were lots of fantastic products and lots of budding entrepreneurism demonstrated but you looked at the product and thought it would cost £3 million to get to market and then you don't know if it will succeed.
"You have to find your route to market and talk to those routes before you even try to launch your business," she adds. "A lot of entrepreneurs - I'd say around 85% - do not do that. They don't do any market research, they don't think about brand awareness and they don't think about a realistic marketing or PR budget. Any new business venture needs all of that. Funding to me is ancillary because if you have the right product with the right people in the right place, you will get funding. If you can demonstrate to the bank that you have a bag of orders there then you will get funding. The problem is that people don't bother to do it."
Breaking new ground
Devey herself is testament to both the need for effective market research and hard graft. Her fortune comes from the rather unenthralling - and male-dominated - world of freight and, in particular, her vision back in 1995 of creating a "hub-and-spoke" network of haulage companies which would pick up and deliver pallets to a national hub from where they could be distributed to anywhere in the UK.
The idea was not new; it had originally been imported to the UK by FedEx in the 1980s and was already being used in the parcel sector by TNT, where Devey had previously worked as a sales director after starting her career with logistics organisation Tibbett & Britten. "What had never been done was a haulage hub-and-spoke system whereby they fed into a central hub rather than the end-delivery point," says Devey. "The other thing that had never been done either was a haulage membership or franchise operation."
The idea crystallised in her mind while working for herself on a consultancy basis, when she found herself helping a national UK retailer set up its own hauliers' scheme along similar lines for its own internal use.
"I was watching these hauliers and I just thought what a waste of money and what a huge environmental expenditure it was, running all these vehicles all over the country at a third utilisation and having all these people on the telephone trying to find loads going here, there and everywhere to fill vehicles," she recalls. "I thought that if I could bring the hub-and-spoke operation and the central hub concept to haulage then it had to be a winner because it allowed hauliers to increase their revenues without increasing capital expenditure."
This is where the research and hard work kicked in. "I found out there were 10,666 hauliers registered with the Road Hauliers Association, of which probably 60 belonged to some form of networking operation," she says. "So that gave me 10,600 to go for and that was a big market. I started by driving up and down motorways with a dictaphone in my hand, taking names and phone numbers off lorries and then when I got back home I phoned them up and explained my concept and asked if they would be interested in meeting me. That's how it began."
The early days were tough. Denied a loan by the bank, Devey was forced to sell her house and car to muster together the £112,000 she needed to launch the business. "I was in a second world war aircraft hangar in a portocabin in the middle of nowhere, with no running water and no electricity," she says.
"I learned excellent bladder control because I was sharing two chemical loos with 40 or 50 lorry drivers so it wasn't my favourite place to visit and I used to have to take bottled water every day just to make a cup of tea. They were incredibly hard days and I had no money. I used to measure expenditure in terms of pallet movements rather than pound notes. But I'm very proud of that because in every business without pain there will be no gain. Business is all about self-sacrifice and I really loved that business. It was my world."
It still is, in fact; albeit one that is vastly different to the version Devey set up back in 1996. Today the company is a multi-million pound operation, receiving as many as 17,000 pallets and filling up to 350 lorries a day. "It's gone through a metamorphic change," says Devey. "It was a little acorn that fell off a tree and it's now a massive oak tree with many branches, spreading out not just in the UK but throughout Europe.
"It's obviously adapted and evolved but essentially the ethos that I set off with is still enshrined within the corporate entity today and that is to nurture your people and don't be afraid to find out what's bad about your business or what your employees think about you. I've managed to have a board of directors and a management team that have been with me for the best part of 15 years, and I don't believe in losing skilled staff because losing human resources costs money."
Last year Pall-Ex set up a division in Italy and now has eyes on a pan-European network. A base on the Iberian peninsula opened this year, with another scheduled to open in Romania later this year and further branches planned for Poland, Benelux, Turkey, Germany and France in the future.
Trading overseas, though, throws up some very different challenges to a national operation, says Devey. "Not only have you got legalities associated with each country but you also have cultural problems," she says. "The Mediterranean countries are much more laid back than us. They have sabbaticals from 1-5pm but for me it's business as usual. So what if the sun shines? It rains here but my trucks still run and I expect the same from any European partners."
Also on the agenda is a national franchise courier and package delivery service in the form of Pronto Sameday Couriers; something Devey felt she had to offer after seeing how the market for consumer shopping was changing.
"It's a very different model but it's a necessary market and it's also the future," she says. "I believe that in 10 years' time shops will not exist; there might be showrooms but most of it will be web-based. One Christmas about three years ago I went to a local shopping centre where generally at Christmas time you couldn't get a parking space and it was empty. I realised that everybody was buying online and that we had to be prepared for this.
"Setting up something like this is not easy because you've got to have six months' proven track record before you can franchise, and it's quite time and cost-consuming as well," she adds. "But we are getting there and it's starting to show signs of becoming a profitable entity. But it's a very competitive market."
New horizons
While still Devey's first love, Pall-Ex, though, is no longer her sole focus. Her appearance on The Business Inspector last year saw her mentor and later invest in Wow Table Art, a company run by Gary Martin offering table decorations for weddings and corporate events that was inevitably struggling at the time.
"I went in to help because he was unfocused and just gathering in everything," she recalls. "I said he needed to have a direction and a vision. I couldn't get him off the phone after I'd filmed with him so in the end I said we needed to go into business together if I was spending that much time on it. I bought 50% and it's going from strength to strength. The next stage is to start franchising it, in the Middle East initially because it's a very over-the-top product."
For Devey, who suffered a stroke two years ago which required her to take several months off work, this type of investment - along with those she makes in the den - represent the future. "Pall-Ex has taken 16 years of my life away and still does to a degree," she says. "I've been in the middle of the Sahara desert having conference calls with the directors. I don't want to be a 100% shareholder in another business. I'm quite happy to have the people with the knowledge running them and I'll add momentum, acumen, ideas and investment to their business. It would give me great pleasure to see every business I've invested in in the den succeed."
Charity work also plays a prominent role in her life. Devey remains in contact with both Syke Community Base and the Back Door Music Project - two Rochdale-based charities she came across when filming The Secret Millionaire back in 2008 - and is patron of both The Princess Royal Trust for Carers and The Stroke Association.
"The Princess Royal Trust for Carers does some incredible work giving carers a respite and The Stroke Association is incredibly close to my heart," she says. "I know what it's like to go from being a normal intelligent person one day to waking up and not being able to spell the word "the" and to have to suffer the humility of somebody helping you bathe and put your pyjamas on. The government purse strings cannot continue to extend to these causes so we - the public - have a moral duty to start giving and participating in these for the sake of our country. I'm quite ferocious about that."
She makes no apologies, either, for using her newfound higher profile to raise awareness of her charitable causes, and is currently organising a celebratory dinner for Syke Community Base and the Back Door Music Project in Manchester. "I want to get some Coronation Street stars and footballers involved," she says.
Her own personal life has perhaps been even more challenging than her business career. Her former husband walked out on her when their son was just three years old and she balanced running a business with bringing him up on her own. More recently, she has had to cope with her son's heroin addiction; something she believes means he is unlikely to ever be truly independent. "He's now 25 and he lives with his mum in a self-contained flat," she says. "He is getting better day by day but it's a slow journey and it requires a lot of patience. There have been a lot of highs and a lot of lows in my life, and that was the lowest."
A more positive note was her second marriage in March, to a property developer she describes as her "alter ego". "He makes me laugh and he brings me out of myself," she says. "We can have a conversation that's not about business. That's quite refreshing for me."
Despite the current turbulent economic climate, Devey remains convinced of the potential for entrepreneurs to make money and is clearly relishing her new role in the den. "With every recession comes an opportunity," she says. "It really depends on the person, product and the place. When is a good time to start a business? If you've got a good concept, a good business plan and you're prepared to self-sacrifice, why not?"
Devey may be good for the den, but you get the feeling the den will turn out to be very good for Devey, too.
