You have to hand it to the BBC. After two series with the joviality of Simon Woodroffe, the meekness of Rachel Elnaugh and even the tough arrogance of Doug Richards and Peter Jones, the Dragons’ Den organisers really pulled it out of the bag for the third series of the programme, broadcast this autumn.

In picking the hitherto little-known Deborah Meaden – ex-owner of Weststar Holidays – the researchers finally wooed someone worthy of the programme’s title. A dragon. A real, old-fashioned school headmistress kind of dragon who made the former King of the Den – the grumpy Glaswegian Duncan Bannatyne – look more like a cowering kitten than a fully fledged fire-breathing monster.

Described as ‘sour-faced’ and a ‘hatchet woman’ by The Guardian (which she didn’t like, although she did like another headline that simply read ‘Don’t f**k with the Meaden’), this new addition to the den must be pretty much the last person would-be entrepreneurs would choose to humiliate themselves in front of on national television.

Or is she? Is it really fair that the nation now respects and fears ‘the Meaden’ in equal measures on the basis of a heavily edited television programme caught up in a prime-time ratings war; a war incidentally which the BBC won hands-down, inspired as much by their star dragon as anyone?

The short answer is yes. She even admits as much. She recognises herself from the show, albeit watching through her fingers in a darkened room with just her husband for company. Perhaps more predictably, her staff recognise her too.

Selective viewing

But that’s not the whole story by any means. For one thing, Meaden is actually quite good company. She’s lively, chatty, she even laughs at times (which would never make it through the BBC editors). She’s also very fond of gestures. Arms fly, fingers point, tails swish (metaphorical ones, anyway). But when confined to a chair and surrounded by others who can give her a run for her plentiful amount of money when it comes listening to the sound of their own voice, all you’re left with is the stony face that looks like it’s just been subjected to an encounter with a removable toilet seat cover.

“I hate to say it but it is me,” she says. “It’s a concentrated version of me but it is definitely me. I’ve asked my friends and they say they have seen and heard me say all those things that I do on camera. The only thing they say is that I come across as sterner on television. I have a lot of fun in business but I don’t think that really comes across in the programme."

One thing is for sure, though: you wouldn’t want to mess with this particular dragon. I sailed close to the wind at least once during our interview at the London Hilton Hotel, notably when I put it to her that Elnaugh had said she felt she was only in the first two series as a token woman and did she feel the same (she felt the BBC had been looking for a woman but disliked my use of the word ‘token’). “That implies ‘oh god, we’ve got to find a woman, she’ll do’,” says Meaden. “I’m not there as a token woman. I’m there, I hope, because I’m good at what I do and I add something to the show. I’m a dragon in that programme.”

She certainly is. In fact, you get the impression that even St George may have had his work cut out to subdue this particular dragon once someone had given her cage a quick shake. “I would like to be thought of as firm but fair,” she says. “But I don’t care who likes me or who doesn’t like me. I don’t care how many people I upset as long as it’s for the good of the whole. And if I’ve got to make tough decisions, then I’m going to make tough decisions.

“At Weststar Holidays we had an absolute rule,” adds Meaden. “I don’t care what mistakes anybody’s made, they had to tell me about it. If they tried to cover it up and it turned into a problem later, all hell would break loose. That’s when people see my wrath: if they try to bullshit me or misrepresent me or put spin on stuff. I won’t have it.”

She’s candid enough to realise that her way of doing business has probably cost her somewhere along the line. “Even with my friends I can be a bit too damned direct,” she admits. “As a leader in a business, it was my job to get the best out of my people. That meant that I ended up with very robust people because I’m very robust myself. If I have a weakness, it’s probably that I’ve lost some quite good people who didn’t thrive in that environment and I didn’t temper my approach to nurture them.”

The making of Meaden

But Meaden’s take-it-or-leave-it, my-way-or-the-highway approach is engrained in her character and it’s certainly no charade put on for the benefit of staff or television cameras. Nor is there any denying that it’s proved to be highly effective over the years.

Meaden set up her first business – importing ceramic and glass products from Italy – after leaving college, leaving behind a three-month stint as a showroom model (no sniggering at the back, please). But despite having sole agency rights, the goods started appearing in other high street shops and, without the finances for a legal fight, Meaden walked away and took on a franchise in Somerset for Italian footwear and clothing company Stefanel, one of the first in the UK.

“That was a great experience; it was great fun setting it up and I learned a lot but I have a low boredom threshold and it just turned into running a shop,” she says. “And I’m not too happy about the franchising model. One of the strains in my career has been about being in control of my own destiny and I don’t like the constraints it puts on you. You’re making a lot of money for someone else and there are an awful lot of rules and regulations and, at the end of the day, it’s not really your business.”

So with a bit of experience but no real money, Meaden decided to take up one of the concessions her parents then ran in the Butlins and Haven holiday camp network, running a bingo hall at Butlins site. “I learned more business lessons through that than at any other point in my career,” she says. “You’ve got to be very good because it’s a very social thing. If the customers didn’t like you, they walked out and you could see them go. That was a really good lesson to learn.”

But if it was the bingo halls of Butlins where Meaden learned her trade, it was Weststar Holidays that became her stomping ground. After leaving the world of bingo, Meaden became general manager and then operations manager at the Bryson Group – her parents’ company that ran the concessions – taking responsibility initially for running the leisure side of a holiday park in Minehead, Cornwall, and then for all the group’s leisure activities and amusement arcades.

But, once more, it was the lack of control that bothered Meaden – this time over the concessions from Butlins and Haven on which the Bryson Group relied – and in 1993 she accepted an invitation from her parents to become operations director at Weststar, which had been set up by her parents five years previously and then consisted of just two parks in Mullion and Looe Bay. Within two years Meaden had become managing director and the company embarked on a programme of expansion that saw the number of parks expand to five by 1999.

“Holiday parks are now well-known products but at that stage they were quite off-centre. We were one of the first to have an indoor pool and also to develop entertainment from the clubs so we were pretty cutting-edge,” says Meaden. “I’ve always said that if you’re in business – whether at the low end or the top end of the market – just be the best, so we set out our stall to make Weststar the best holiday park provider within its sector.”

Yet despite running a successful business, Meaden wanted more. “I’d put all my eggs into that particular basket and I wanted to see evidence that I would one day take control of the company,” she explains. “So in 1997 I struck up negotiations with my parents, saying ‘either I get to take over the majority of this business or I’m going to spend my time doing something else’.

After two years of wrangling, they finally agreed to sell the company and Meaden eventually secured the necessary funds to take over the business, for which she paid a “very full price”. Her mother disappeared from the business altogether, while her father retained a non-executive director role.

“Succession is a difficult situation for families to deal with so give my parents a great deal of credit for recognising that what I was saying was absolutely right,” she says. “A lot of family businesses have to bring something to boiling point before it gets out on the table and that’s a recipe for disaster. I had a very good experience of family businesses because we were absolutely clear what was family and what was business. Our whole approach was that if we looked after the business, the business would take care of us.”

With Meaden finally at the helm and able to exercise her entrepreneurial muscles, Weststar was gradually transformed into what she describes as “a lean, mean fighting machine”. The number of sites was reduced from five to three, selling a plot in Riviera Bay, Cornwall, to her to sister and another one in Looe also being sold off.

With three main sites – in Mullion Bay on the Lizard peninsular, Looe Bay in Cornwall and Sandford Holiday Park in South Dorset – all generating new business in a growing marketplace on the back of quality but affordable holidays, Weststar soon found itself the target of several takeover approaches. A deal to sell in 2003 was aborted at midnight on the day the contracts were meant to be signed when the buyers reduced their price at the last minute and Meaden walked away. But the whole process made Meaden think about exiting and in 2005 she finally sold the company to Phoenix Equity Partners in a £33m deal.

Meaden still retains a 23% stake in the business and a non-executive director role that accounts for an average of two days a week, a condition Phoenix insisted on as part of the deal. She initially carried on in a quasi-marketing director position but took a six-week break last November after which she returned to concentrate on making acquisitions, the first of which was Hayling Island in Hampshire, bought for £13m earlier this year.

Den of equity

Meaden’s love for business, she says, is what gets her up in the morning and she was all set to begin looking for start-up companies that were in need of both investment and a bit of mentoring when Dragons’ Den came calling. “You’ve got a team of BBC researchers going out and looking for products for you,” she explains. “I’ve seen products that I think are bloody silly. But I’ve also seen, and have invested in some, that I think are very good products and which I would never have found in the outside world.”

She made a total of four investments in the first series of Dragons’ Den – all with fellow dragon Theo Paphitis – and would be interested in doing a second series as well. One of these investments – the service station truck-washing firm – fell through at a very late stage when the entrepreneur decided to accept his bank’s offer of finance with no equity involved, a decision Meaden describes as “bloody irritating”.

Meaden also invested in Ian Chamings’s MixAlbum company, a music-download website that allows users to mix tracks; The Nuts Poker League; and Coin metrics, a wireless revenue system for fruit and arcade machines. She has also invested in a market research company outside of the show.

“The people who I’ve invested in generally are entrepreneurs who can say ‘this is what I want to do with this, these are the numbers, this is the market, I’ve done the research and that’s why this is going to sell’,” she says. “That, to me, is the twist of an entrepreneur. To me, it’s not someone who’s invented something and isn’t quite sure what to do with it.”

For Meaden, the most important thing when making an investment is that the product actually works. That may sound obvious, but many would-be entrepreneurs arrived in the den with prototypes that either didn’t work or hadn’t been properly tested. “You’ll see a few times on the programme when I say ‘great idea but I’ve got no idea whether it works so I’m not investing’,” she says.

“You know a good product when you see it and you think ‘yes, there’s a market here’. I would invest in a good product with a bad person because I think you can bolster someone up,” she adds. “But I would never invest in a good person with a bad product because a good person will just waste their energies trying to support what is a fundamentally bad idea. Good ideas almost have a little bit of life of their own whereas bad products just need to be allowed to die.”

Yet for all the dubious inventions Meaden and her fellow dragons examined in a whirlwind two months – and there were many – she remains upbeat about the UK’s claim to be a nation of entrepreneurs. And the key for any business model remains the same. “Demystify it. Simplify it. Keep in tune with what is going on. I watch so many businesses become over-complicated with layer upon layer of management,” she says.

“I think on Dragons’ Den I come over as quite a practical person. I wouldn’t invest in that toilet seat because I don’t want to have to hover my face over a toilet. It’s a very practical reason and it’s very odd that when people get into business and get removed from their customers they forget all the obvious stuff and it all becomes figures and theories. Just ask the simple questions: do customers want this? Is there a market? Keep it simple.”

There’s no doubt that Meaden’s arrival in the den has raised the temperature still further and contributed massively to the continued success of this unlikely hit television show. But for all the stern looks, the ‘I am not impressed’ faces and the cool putdowns, there’s more to Meaden than meets the eye. And when this particular dragon roars, you’d do well to listen. If only from a distance.