A televangelist for business - FT.com It is 9am and Kevin O'Leary has just arrived back at his 17th-floor apartment in Toronto's fashionable Yorkville district, fresh from a radio talk-show appearance to promote Redemption Inc, his latest reality television show. Some irate callers to the show, he reports, were up in arms at the idea of tapping into the entrepreneurial talents of the former drug dealers, bank robbers, fraudsters and other ex-convicts who compete in the eight-part series to prove their skills in running a legitimate business. But Mr O'Leary - who presents Redemption Inc and has invested in the show - sees the venture as a combination of good business, good entertainment and good philanthropy. It also makes a neat fit for the energetic 57-year-old entrepreneur, investor and, latterly, TV personality. In North America, however, he has gained a reputation as a provocative cheerleader for business and the free market. This was initially driven by appearances on TV shows such as the Canadian version of Dragons" Den and The Lang & O'Leary Exchange. In the former, as one of five dragon investors, he breathes the most fire at the aspiring entrepreneurs pitching to win backing for their business ideas; in the latter, he is equally fiery as the unabashed capitalist foil to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation business journalist Amanda Lang, whom he describes as "leftwing." Two years ago, Mr O'Leary was also recruited to Shark Tank, the ABC network's US version of Dragons" Den. Dressed in a sober grey suit, outgoing and enthusiastic about his various ventures, his demeanour is that of a very opinionated venture capitalist. Of the Redemption Inc contestants, he says: "You've got a guy who's running a $100m drug trafficking business, who had 100 employees, did sales of $100m a year, distribution, product costs, marketing, sales, you name it. He could be running a brewery with $100m in sales. I just want to see if I can get him a job so that as a taxpayer I don't have to put him back in jail. US version of 'Dragons' Den' He has a one-third stake in the show, with the rest split equally between the CBC and Jasper James, a British reality TV producer, who came up with the idea. Mr O'Leary evokes strong feelings both among fans and foes for his hardheadedness, embodied in the title of his recent biography - Cold Hard Truth - and the blunt advice he is wont to offer entrepreneurs. Advising budding business creators to put emotion aside, for instance, he says: "You've got to "fire your mother." You've got to look at the cash you've got left in the bank, and say: "This is the lifeblood of what I'm doing. Everything else doesn't matter." " At the same time, says Julie Bristowe, executive producer of Dragons" Den for CBC: "He's very good at not allowing people to go ahead with ideas that are going to bankrupt themselves or their families." TV - whether he is appearing on it or backing programmes - now occupies about a third of his time. Mr O'Leary's entrepreneurial credentials stretch back to 1984, when he set up an educational software business in the basement of his Toronto home. Originally called SoftKey - the first syllable was meant to evoke an association in customers" minds with Microsoft - the business went on to acquire The Learning Company, producer of the popular Reader Rab­bit series, whose name it then adopted. The company employed 3,000 people worldwide by the time Mr O'Leary and his partners sold it to Mattel, the US toymaker, for $4.2bn in 1999. He went on to set up a business that provides storage space for surplus furniture and other household goods. His most high-profile current venture is Montreal-based O'Leary Funds, which manages 21 mutual funds, and of which he is chairman. Several other O'Leary start-ups have flop­ped, however. Not given to modesty, Mr O'Leary says that failures pave the way for successes, explaining that "as you get older, you don't make the same mistakes again and you tend to be far more myopic about what you know works." In fact, it was a setback that led to his TV career. He and Thomas Lee, a US private-equity pioneer, fell foul of Canadian foreign-ownership restrictions that meant they were prevented from buying a TV business-news channel in 2003. But he persuaded the channel's chief executive to feature him as a guest on a show. "I hadn't been thinking of myself as a TV personality, but I did watch a lot of CNBC and I told [the chief executive] that I could do better than those blowhards," Mr O'Leary says in his autobiography. Besides O'Leary Funds, he also oversees a venture-capital business that typically juggles about 20 prospective deals at any one time. He is currently working on a licensing deal to sell wine under his name. He also sees opportunities in the home-mortgage business in Canada. The next venture could be Kevin O'Leary credit cards. "It's extending the brand," he says. He declines to disclose details of turnover or of his personal wealth, saying only: "I have enough money to be free." He owns homes in Boston and Toronto, and a lakeside cottage north of the city. He also rents a place in Florida. Mr O'Leary will give the eventual winner of Redemption Inc C$100,000 (US$98,000) out of his own pocket as seed capital. He says he has been impressed by the 10 finalists" talents. He points to a big photograph of moose antlers on one of the apartment walls: he was persuaded to buy it at the local art gallery where the eight men and two women spent two days honing their sales skills. The convicts-turned-entrepreneurs could discover that appearing on Redemption Inc was the easy part, however. Mr O'Leary has invested in about a dozen businesses pitched on Dragons" Den and Shark Tank. But admits he has made money from only two. One sells work and gardening gloves that protect women's nails - "what I've learnt there, is always invest in the vanity of women," he says - while the other sells mobile phone-related advertisements. Despite the relatively modest success rate, the TV career has brought benefits for his business interests, he says. Chats with guests before and after a show, for example, yield many useful investment tips. Increasingly, he says, the most rewarding way to invest in a small business is not through equity but via royalty agreements, debt instruments and factoring arrangements. "All of a sudden it's getting very interesting, as opposed to just putting out money on common shares and never seeing it again," he says.