Datel customers spend an evening with Dragon’s Den star Peter Jones

On 13th June, business owners from throughout the UK attended an exclusive event with Dragon’s Den star Peter Jones, Sage’s Ambition Ambassador. Hosted by Sage, the event celebrated the ambition and success of British businesses, including those using Sage solutions and others recognised as ambitious businesses through a Sage competition.

Attendees at the event included Sage Ambition Competition winner Sam Charles, director of digital marketing agency Float_digital, nine other competition finalists, Datel customers and members of the Datel executive team, including Executive Chairman Alan Simpson.

Peter Jones

Peter Jones (left) and Mark Tweddle (right)

Peter took centre stage with Sage CEO Stephen Kelly to discuss their experience of working together, offering fascinating insight into their business experiences and responding to audience questions. Questions were met with honest, thoughtful and humble responses from Peter, who spoke about everything from failures he experienced in his own career to what ambition means to him.

Prior to the event, Stephen and Peter hosted an exclusive round table, which included entrepreneurs and directors of UK companies with Sage at the heart of their business. In attendance were Datel customers Mark and Yvonne Tweddle of Jupiter Marketing - a company listed as on Sunday Times’ International Track 200 and featured in a global Sage campaign, and Golfbreaks.com Managing Director Steve Hemsworth.

Of the event, Mark Tweddle, managing director of Jupiter Marketing, said: “Overall it was an amazing evening. We learnt a lot from what Peter and Stephen are doing, as well as other really interesting business leaders."

The event was also a great opportunity for Datel customers to network with Sage and Datel executives, as described by Golfbreaks Managing Director Steve Hemsworth: “I thought the whole afternoon was invaluable providing great insight and networking opportunity and a real supporting benefit to the overall relationship build between Sage, Datel and Golfbreaks.”

Datel customer Alistair McPherson of UK clothing distributor Ralawise also attended the evening event and commented, “I certainly thought selecting Peter Jones as an ambassador for Sage is a great match”, Alistair said. “Whilst we are all business leaders and entrepreneurs, it was even more inspiring to listen to his experiences and thoughts, especially when the questions from the audience were clearly not rehearsed and yet he was able to consider and give a clarity of thought extremely succinctly.”

Appointed in his role as Ambition Ambassador in April this year, Peter has used Sage throughout this business journey. He commented “I’m thrilled to have joined Sage as its newly appointed Ambition Ambassador a role that gives me great pride because of what I can do with Sage to support British businesses in order to unlock their biggest potential, both in the UK and abroad.”