Graeme Fraser-Bell has given presentations to banks and private equity firms around the world, but nothing could quite prepare him for the full force of the Dragons’ Den firing line.
Graeme and his sister Fiona are amongst the entrepreneurs in the latest series of the BBC2 show, hoping to gain investment for their party game Accentuate.
But while the Wirral pair who run their business from Clayhill Industrial Park in Neston have to remain tight-lipped as to the outcome of their efforts until their episode is screened, Graeme reveals that he did come in for a mauling at the hands of one multi-millionaire backer in particular.
“Viewers will definitely see me being scorched by a Dragon to begin with,” he laughs. “Peter Jones drove the bus over me and reversed back again! But then they’ll have to wait and see how we pick ourselves up again after that, and hopefully make a credible recovery.”
The sibling business partners are amongst the first to face a revamped Den line-up which features regulars Peter Jones and Deborah Meaden along with newcomers Nick Jenkins, Sarah Willingham and Touker Suleyman,
They decided to put themselves through the TV challenge a year after launching their guess-the-accent party game.
Accentuate first came about, explains Graeme, when he was sitting around his dinner table in Thurstaston with friends one evening back in 2011.
“Everyone had had a few wines and we were comparing our best accents,” he recalls. “Going round the table we realised some of them were atrocious and it was a bit of a laugh.
“I worked as a global sales and marketing manager, so although I was born in Birkenhead I’ve lived in South Africa, the States and all over the UK. I’ve been exposed to lots of different languages and dialects, so I thought there might be something in the accent idea.
“I registered the company and started to develop it. It was very basic to begin with but then in 2012 I gave Fiona a share certificate for Christmas which was a percentage of Accentuate Games and I said to her ‘this will either be the cheapest Christmas present I’ve ever given you, or the most expensive’!”
They spent a year crafting the gameplay and making it more interesting and entertaining before finally Accentuate was ready to launch into the market in 2014.
Bidding to get it on high street shelves and online, they pitched it to John Lewis where they found an encouraging response.
“When we got to London to present to them, we found all the young buyers in the office playing it,” laughs Graeme.
Watching them enjoying it in action proved it could be a hit, and the game is now sold through John Lewis, Amazon and Firebox.com, as well as in a number of independent shops all around the UK and their own website www.accentuategames.com .
It’s appeal, he explains, is in its simplicity and the element of surprise. “If you had a table full of actors it would be the most boring game ever because they’d all be pretty good,” he adds. “It’s one of those games where the worse you are at it, the funnier it is. To me it’s the verbal equivalent of Pictionary, which I love because I’m absolutely useless at art.
“It’s about embarrassing hilarity, but also finding out those friends or family members who are actually great mimics - the quiet ones who suddenly come out with a brilliant Russian accent.”
The 53-year-old says he and Fiona decided to apply for Dragons’ Den to move their business on, and to help see it through inevitable sales ups and downs.
“The games industry is horrendously seasonal, a huge percentage of everything we do is in the last two months of the year, so that brings big cashflow constraints. You’ve got to have deep pockets just to set up something like this, because before you do anything else you have to invest heavily in setting up the brand and website and also in IP - intellectual property - protection for design and trademark because you can’t actually patent a game. What you have to do is rush to take over a particular market space so if there are other accent games out there, we’ve got to have Accentuate recognised.”
Graeme and Fiona, who is 10 years younger, applied for Dragons’ Den last autumn, and he admits they were nervous and a little apprehensive when a phone call in January told them they’d been accepted.
“But we knew we had to be well prepared, so we had a list of about 56 questions we thought they might hit us with and we developed our responses and got all the data so we could answer them,” he says.
They went into the Den asking for £45,000 for a 15% share of their company and, apart from that volley from Peter Jones, Graeme says they enjoyed the experience.
“And most importantly the Dragons got to play our game and there were some great accents in there!” he laughs.
