Opinion
opinion // Helen Lord
No one’s challenging you? That’s a problem
Aſter a very public grilling on the BBC’s Dragon’s Den, Rehome co-founder Helen Lord says the experience taught her that perhaps that level of scrutiny should be built into every business...
felt it was a great opportunity to highlight the importance of reuse and its role in creating a more sustainable future for our industry. We walked in proud and prepared. We anticipated tough questions. We knew it would be challenging. But what we didn’t anticipate was the invaluable business lesson we gained from the experience. The show aired with a harsh edit (we spent over
Y
two hours in the Den), personal critiques, and lots of armchair critics on social media. But something valuable also happened: uncomfortable, direct scrutiny of decisions we had made. As business owners, this is a rare gift indeed! In our case, the spotlight quickly turned to our IT systems, mainly the cost, and whether the investment was justified. It wasn’t an easy conversation to have, especially when you’ve committed significant time and money to getting it right and followed the best advice available at the time. But here’s the smack of reality: “We’ve already invested, we have to make it work” is a critical warning sign. Like most business owners, we made decisions on things we had no experience of. We backed our technology choice early, back in 2022, because we believed (following advice) it would give us the right functionality to support our vision. At
ou may have seen Phil and I entering Dragons’ Den on BBC One recently to present
Rehome.co.uk. The BBC invited us onto the show, and we
This sits with the business owners. Did we push
hard enough? Had we questioned deeply enough? Had we stayed close enough to the detail? For independent kitchen businesses, ours
is a familiar story. You are balancing design, customer expectations, supply chains, margins, and increasingly, technology. You do not have the luxury of in-house experts in every field, so you bring people in. But bringing people in should never mean
the time, those decisions felt right. These were informed, considered, and supported by verified external advisors provided by funding. But under the pressure of the Dragons asking simple, commercial questions, the cracks became visible and blindsided us: Was the platform right in 2026 and was it moving the business forward? It’s not a complex question, but one that many businesses avoid asking once the time and money have been invested.
Don’t get comfortable Another uncomfortable point raised was our
reliance on advisors outside of our business. We collaborated with people who came recommended. We trusted their expertise. Again, a completely normal approach and one taken across the KBB sector every day, whether it is IT, marketing, or operations. But here is the hardest lesson: a recommendation doesn’t come with accountability.
stepping back. Our experience has reinforced something important: discomfort is where the real work happens. If no one is challenging your decisions, you are too comfortable. And comfort is dangerous! That doesn’t mean every criticism is correct. But the act of being challenged and sometimes rethinking is where the magic happens. Most people will not experience the intensity
of a Dragons’ Den pitch. But that level of scrutiny shouldn’t just be reserved for a TV show. What’s changed for us moving forward is
we now challenge ‘ourselves’, no matter how uncomfortable, or trusted the advice we receive. Asking harder questions, staying closer to the
detail, and keeping accountability firmly with us. We have grown as business owners and Rehome will be stronger as a result. We went into the Den to raise awareness. What we left with was something arguably more valuable: perspective. The kind that only comes when someone looks at your business from the outside and asks: “why?”.
kbbr
What do you think? We always want to hear your views and opinions, so email
editor@kbbreview.com to be featured in a future issue
16
kbbreview
May 2026
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