Sara Davies: 'If You Do Hire Me, This Is the Me You're Going to Get'

There's a phone call Sara Davies still remembers in exact detail. She was on a train to King's Cross, heading for a screen test at Touker Suleiman's offices. The executive producer of Dragon's Den had just told her she was one of eight finalists for the panel. She had a real shot. And then the producer said something that stopped her cold.

"You're a little bit nice," she told Sara. "We just need you to be a little bit more dragon-like."

Most people, in that position, would have nodded. You adjust. You perform. You give them what they want. Sara Davies, founder of craft empire Crafter's Companion, the youngest woman ever to sit on the Dragon's Den panel, and the kind of person who walks into a room of 1,200 business owners and has them onside before she's finished her first sentence, spent the entire train journey wrestling with it. She could turn it on. She could sit up straight, look severe, be whoever the BBC needed for the show. But she kept coming back to the same thought: if the version of me that gets this job isn't actually me, then every time I sit in that Den, I have to be that person.

She made her decision as she walked through Touker's door. She sat with her legs crossed, stayed colloquial, kept everything open. At the end of the screen test, she looked directly into the camera lens and said: "I'm fully aware that I'm very different to all the other dragons you've recruited before me. But if you do hire me, this is the me you're going to be getting, and you need to be okay with that."

They took weeks to respond. When they did, she felt what she describes as a weight being lifted. Not because she'd got the job, though she had. Because someone had given her "permission to be me on a national scale, on prime time TV." It was, she says now, the first in a series of dominoes that changed not just her career but her entire approach to business, leadership, and what it means to build something that lasts.

The Cost of Performing for Every Room You Walk Into

Sara Davies spent most of her twenties adjusting. She'd talk her way into rooms, boards, advisory groups, steering committees, and then study everyone else at the table and modify her behaviour accordingly. Her husband Simon, who has worked alongside her in the business since the beginning, eventually said to her: "I don't know which one's the real you. There are so many versions of you."

She didn't find that funny. What she recognised in it was imposter syndrome in its most exhausting form, not the fear of being found out, but the constant work of becoming whoever the situation seemed to demand. "I would think: who do I have to be to earn my seat at this table? And then I would just modify my behaviours to be whatever felt appropriate in that moment." It was, she admits, genuinely tiring.

Something shifted in her early thirties, and she traces it with some surprise to Dragon's Den. Getting the job was one thing. What came with it was external confirmation that the real her, the Northern woman who says "me mam" instead of "my mum," who would rather wear a purple spotty high-street dress than a structured suit, was not just acceptable but preferable. The stylist at Selfridges had told her the dress wasn't really Dragon's Den. "But it feels very you now I've spent an hour with you," he added. She went with it. The BBC, to everyone's mild surprise, approved it.

After that first series, she commissioned a branding agency called Ponderosa to do something that sounds almost uncomfortably thorough: interview everyone who knew her well, her parents, her husband, her best friend, her sister, long-standing staff, and then do social listening to understand how she was perceived in her industry. They came back with a thirty-page document that told Sara Davies who she was. Her husband Simon, an accountant and characteristically straight to the point, looked at it and said: "We've just paid a lot of money for something I could have told you myself." She doesn't disagree. But she needed it written down. "It gave me permission to be myself in a way that felt like a strategic document," she says. She lived by it for the next seven years.

She's updated it since. But the core principle hasn't changed. "My personal brand is my biggest currency. The biggest joy people experience when they meet me in real life is that I'm exactly what they expected." She means this seriously. The consistency between the Sara Davies on television, in Tesco, at the school gates, and in a boardroom is not a soft personal value, it's a competitive advantage, one that took years of deliberate work to build and protect.

Why Imposter Syndrome Is a Question You're Not Qualified to Answer

Sara talks about imposter syndrome with the authority of someone who has coached it out of her own team as well as lived through it herself. And she has a framework for it that's more useful than most.

She describes sitting in the Den for the first time, looking along the panel and realising she was next to Deborah Meaden. The actual Deborah Meaden. And she felt herself begin to slip, watching how Deborah sat, how she framed her questions, beginning to wonder if she should be doing it differently. She caught herself. "Who am I to judge whether I'm good enough to be a dragon? The BBC made that decision. The commissioner, the head of programming, the exec producer, they chose the seventeen dragons who came before me. I have no skills in how to pick a good dragon. I'm sitting there on their heads."

Her job, she concluded, was simply to show up as the person they'd hired and do the work to the best of her ability. Not to second-guess the decision someone more qualified had already made on her behalf.

She applies this directly when developing her own people. When her long-standing PA Rachel returned from maternity leave, Sara pushed her into a senior commercial role. Rachel's instinct was to say she wasn't sure she was ready. Sara's response was precise: "It's not your call to make. I've decided. I'm in a position to know that you're good enough for this, and I'm putting you forward. It's on my head. Your job is just to go and live up to what I expect of you."

The reframe matters. You don't overcome imposter syndrome by convincing yourself you deserve to be there. You overcome it by accepting that someone who was better placed to judge has already decided that, and your only real job is to show up and deliver.

The 93% That No AI Will Ever Be Able to Read

Sara is an ENFP, and she talks about empathy the way some leaders talk about strategy, as the core discipline of everything she does. She's direct about why. "Empathy is the number one most important skill any business leader needs to have. All the most successful business leaders I look at have it in spades. The ones who are weak, that's what they're lacking."

Her entry point into this is Mehrabian's research: only 7% of what people receive from a communication comes from the words themselves. Thirty-eight per cent is intonation. Fifty-five per cent is body language. She's known this for years. What's distinctive about her application of it is where she focuses the attention, not on how she projects, but on what she receives.

"When I go into board meetings, I spend all my time observing the 93%," she says. "The 7%, the words being said, AI can capture that. It can give me the summary. What I'm doing is looking at every person around that table and reading what their body language is telling me about how they feel about what's being discussed. That's what I'm taking notes on."

She's thought equally carefully about what she broadcasts. During video calls, she positions her camera at eye level so that wherever her gaze falls, the other person always feels she's looking directly at them. She's frank about the contrast: her husband Simon, efficient by nature, used to have two screens set up and would keep working on one screen while a call ran on the other. "For those people in that meeting, especially if it's a meeting with the CEO, what they are reading from his body language is that this is not the most important thing he's doing right now."

There's a practical upshot here for anyone running meetings in the age of AI. Let the technology handle the 7%, the words, the action points, the summary. Use the attention that frees up to focus entirely on the human activity that's actually happening in the room. "You can't go back into a meeting and re-deliver a different performance," she points out. "But you can write notes later."

The Mistake That Cost Her Control of Her Own Company

When Sara talks about her biggest business mistake, she doesn't reach for something comfortable. She goes straight to the decision that, if she'd made it sooner, might have saved her from the worst period of her professional life.

Crafter's Companion had ridden the post-pandemic wave hard. Direct-to-consumer sales grew fivefold during COVID. The business was turning over around £40 million and investing for the next phase of growth. Then the correction came, key B2B customers pulled back significantly, the market quietened, and Sara found herself looking at losses for the first time in the company's history. She was cash-rich. She could absorb it. So she did.

"Just because you can afford to take a hit doesn't mean that you should." She says this the way people say things they wish they'd known earlier. By absorbing the losses rather than acting, making people redundant, downsizing warehouses, right-sizing the operation, she changed something more fundamental than the P&L. "I essentially changed the culture of the business from striving for excellence and driving profitability, to accepting that we were loss-making, and that was okay because we were waiting for the markets to come back." When she finally acted, she'd waited too long, and the cuts she had to make were far deeper than they needed to have been.

It got worse. She'd sold equity to investors over several years, and during the downturn those investors took a controlling stake. She lost control of the strategy. She watched them execute a plan she didn't believe in. When it failed, they put the business into administration, willing to write off the loss. Sara wasn't. She bought the business back. "I couldn't face seeing those 150 staff lose their jobs."

She went through an 18 month turnaround. "I learned more in those 18 months than in the 18 years before it." Her framework for anyone facing something similar: first and always, cash, not profit, not turnover, cash. Second, get comfortable being uncomfortable and make the important decisions daily, not eventually. "Later doesn't get easier," as someone told her once. "It just gets later." Third, understand your why. She came out of the other side no longer chasing scale for its own sake. "I had a business turning over 10 million making a million profit. I put all my effort into growing it. A few years later I had a business turning over 30 million, still making a million profit." Fourth, keep ego in check. She's frank that ego drove the desire for scale. Between Simon and her coach Kirsty, she had people willing to say so. Fifth: have the important conversations. Not difficult ones, she agrees, she credits that reframe to Irene Dorner, former CEO of HSBC USA. Important ones.

What She Actually Looks For When Those Lift Doors Open

When Sara talks about investment, she makes a distinction that should probably be made more often. "I'm not investing in the business," she says. "I'm investing in the entrepreneur."

Her reasoning starts from watching her own trajectory. The business she'd have pitched in its first year looks nothing like the business three years later, or five, or ten. She's pivoted Crafter's Companion constantly, responding to shifts in the market, changes in consumer behaviour, the tariff disruption of the last twelve months reshaping everything they do in America. The business that gets pitched in the Den today is rarely the business that matters in four years. What doesn't change is who the entrepreneur is and how they respond when things go wrong.

She looks for three things: passion, vision, and drive. "What's going to sort the wheat from the chaff? Just those of us who won't give in." She also needs to like the person. Her money, she points out, is not actually what's in short supply. Her time is. If she's going to put her attention and energy into a business, and she means fully into it, in WhatsApps, on the journey, it needs to be with someone she believes in and enjoys working with.

There's something quietly circular about all of this. The quality she values most in the entrepreneurs she backs, the willingness to show up as themselves, to be tenacious and honest under pressure rather than performing for the room, is exactly what she bet on all those years ago when she walked into a screen test and looked down a camera lens and told the BBC: this is the me you're going to get.

She still can't say precisely which domino was the crucial one. The screen test. The dress. The branding document. The BHAG she built with a room full of people who knew her well, that she ticked off inside 18 months. What she knows is that every one of them connected back to the same decision, made on a train to King's Cross by a woman who was terrified and chose to be herself anyway, and found on the other side that it was the most strategic thing she'd ever done.