"I Punched The Air When I Had Three Failures In The Bag” - Simon Woodroffe On Resilience and Perseverance

0:00Simon Woodroffe:I really believed that it was going to be a big deal. And I think when I spoke to people, I didn't hide behind my business plan. My business plan actually said on the front of it, says, you want to make God laugh, show me a business plan. And they said, you can't show that to the bank. And the bank said, well, actually, it's very realistic. We quite like it. hello it's elizabeth day from how to fail here my next guest is the award-winning investigative journalist and best-selling author acclaimed for his deep dives into subjects like the troubles in say nothing and corporate power in empire of pain yes it's patrick radden keith we talk about families we talk about the stories we tell ourselves and how to write them and then there's this.

0:41Simon Woodroffe:The legal threats don't scare me. I will say I get a lot of those. The people, the gangsters never threaten me in a kind of outright way. Listen to How to Fail wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome back to The Businessmen. I'm your host, Ben Shepard. Joel Dummett is off on paternity leave with his newborn son in his hands full of nappies and everything in between. We are both committed as ever to launching our own men's skincare brand. It's getting closer, lovingly named by you as Forsky. To catch up on the full story, do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can watch episodes on YouTube, so subscribe there too.

1:17We have, of course, been speaking to fascinating people in the world of business, asking them all about their failures and their successes. And by the way, today is no exception. I'm joined by the powerhouse that is Simon Woodruff, entrepreneur, maverick, and the original Yeoman, which also happens to be the title of his brilliant new book. It is a wild, honest and brilliantly human autobiography, charting his journey from being nearly broke in his early 40s after business failures and divorce, wondering if it never amounts to anything, to building one of the most iconic and disruptive brands in British culture, Yo Sushi.

1:51A story of grit, reinvention and audacious imagination, just like the man himself. Simon, thank you for joining me on The Businessmen. It's a real honour to have you in the studio, having listened to the audiobook of your autobiography over the weekend. I've been gripped. You've had quite the adventure. Would that be a good way of describing it?

2:14Simon Woodroffe:Yep. It's a rollicking story, yo man is. And it didn't always feel like a rollicking story at the time, as you know. Yeah. But it was. And I look back on it and it was quite alive. The headlines, of course, that everybody will be able to understand is what you created with Yo Sushi, with the Yo brand that has just become a global phenomenon. But the journey to get there is absolutely fascinating. Who were you before Yo Sushi? Well, I was a boy that struggled at home and struggled at school and ended up going to boarding school when I was seven. You know, no moans, but I did. And left Marlborough College, the famous Marlborough College, privileged education when I was 16.

3:05Simon Woodroffe:And into the Sgt. Peppers had just come out. The Doors album would just be released. The world suddenly was colourful. And that's what I did. And when I look back, I'm quite proud of the boy that had the courage to do that. The adventure that you went on post-school and school that was tough. I mean, school that these days, you know, there was criminal activity going on school on the part of some of the teachers that you had to deal with and you grew up with. And I guess you kind of all grew up thinking it was normal. It was normal. I remember years later, we told my mother, you know, in the 50s, they didn't talk about stuff like that.

3:41Simon Woodroffe:I remember we said to my mother that what had gone on, a bit of what had gone on, she said, oh, we always thought he was a bit queer. You know, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. And actually they'd been abusing you and you'd have to. Yeah. You know, I look at what you went through and what you learnt in that time and then what that has armed you with to become the success that you are today. What would you distill that down as? Yeah, you can see how the dots fit together, can't you, when you read the book. um i guess i left school and i didn't have the imagination educated out of me which is what we do to our kids and hopefully education is changing and that's going to change um and then i had a time in the television business selling television rights around the world so i learned international business and contracts and i was very lucky because i had the creative sort of gene and the business gene and i was kind of i ended up being good at both of them or some of the time i was anyway and people say to me you know oh i i've got these ideas but i can't do the money and all of that and i always go we live in an amazing age where you can learn anything i mean look at you exactly look at us and what we're trying to do but it's it is it's it's watching that correlation from so you leave school at 16 not really sure what you're going to do start doing bits and pieces and then end up working in the world of theatre, applying to be an assistant stage manager.

5:10That's right. That's right. And all that that brings with it, for the little that you were earning, but the magic and the creativity and the energy of the people you were around.

5:18Simon Woodroffe:Yeah, I went from, you know, having sort of had a really hard time, even being in prison for a short period of time when I was 17, to coming out and getting a job through the stage newspaper, would you believe? It's madness, really. Just comparing notes because I similarly got my first breaking telly. It's not around anymore, is it? Thank you very much to the stage for both of us. And getting a job in the little theatre club in the very early days of theatre, of Fringe Theatre in the West End and going on to Richmond Theatre and suddenly knowing my stage left from my stage right and my upstage and my downstage and rock and roll coming along and wanting to have big shows and sort of getting involved in that and going on the road as a roadie, really.

6:00Simon Woodroffe:Not what my mum and dad had planned. Not my father, the brigadier, had quite planned for me. And sort of everything sort of went on from there. You touched on your time inside, in prison. I love the little anecdote you tell about meeting Jeffrey Archer at a cocktail party. Yeah, I did, years later. Well, he was in North Sea Camp, which was the detention centre that I was in for eight weeks. And I really couldn't say, he's slightly intimidating. He's a rather nice guy now, but he's a rather intimidating guy. and I said, I couldn't think of what to say to him. So I said, you and I have something in common.

6:34Simon Woodroffe:And he looked down over his little pince-nez glasses and he said, what would that be? And I said, I was in North Sea Camp and there was this very long silence. And he's, you know, to his credit, he said, not a lot of people say that to me at cocktail parties. It was a great way of breaking the eyes. I think that there's the thing that comes across as well. I love how you described it. You still had your imagination when you left school and there was a confidence, there was a sort of naivety and a belief that you could do anything you turned your hand to, you saw something you liked the idea of, you weren't afraid to go and try it and give it a go.

7:10Simon Woodroffe:I suppose so, yes. I suppose that is, you know, you're taught in school, aren't you, that you've got to get the qualifications and you've got to get on that ladder and otherwise things are going to go terribly wrong. And my sort of belief was almost as if one of my attributes was ignorance, ignorance of the the things that could go wrong and i kind of thought you know if you do something you know it's got a chance of working out so yeah that's what i think i happened the enthusiasm for optimism i think is is so fundamental in in a lot of what we do because there's a lot of things that can go wrong and you can get caught up with that there's a brilliant moment in the book where you describe um you used to set yourself the challenge of failing a number of times a day because you understood that success and growth comes through failure.

7:59I thought that was a really interesting sort of idea of going, right, today I'm going to fail five times at something.

8:05Simon Woodroffe:If you can make a game of life and make it into that. And I used to say I'd punch the air when I had three failures in the bag, you know, knowing that only through being willing to strengthen that muscle and Richard Branson calls you, you know, when you fall over, you've got to dust yourself off and get on with it. and realised that everybody's not looking at you. You know, it's only you that's looking at you. Most of the others are looking at themselves and what's going on for them. And so you can get away with anything really in that respect. So let's talk about how you came to create Yo. It was a bit of a light bulb moment.

8:41You were having lunch with someone that sort of you looked up to enormously, weren't you?

8:46Simon Woodroffe:Yeah, I mean, I'd actually gone off to live in Chamonix in the Alps and I thought I had a Vox Lactra inherited from my dear old dad. And, you know, I was going to live a simple life, living in the Alps and going climbing. That was my sort of big thing. And I was down there and I thought, no, I've got something in me. There was a sort of kernel in my oyster that needed really to do something. And I came back and I remember that was another one I set myself as a game, a task. I'm going to call up all the people I'm most scared of. And there was quite a few of them. I don't think I mentioned it in the book.

9:16Simon Woodroffe:There's Harvey Goldsmith, the big promoter. He was one of them. And he said, how are you doing, Simon? And he was kind of a scary character. And suddenly I thought, well, maybe people don't have such a bad view of me in the world, which I sort of thought about at the time. And the other was a guy called Uahara-san, Mr. Uahara, who was actually a pop star in Japan years and years ago. And he had a TV show in Japan, which I'd worked with him on, called Hit Studio Deluxe. A lot of people know that. It was sort of, you know, American bandstand, top of the pops of Japan. and he took me out to very nice to me took me out to lunch at a restaurant in barterbury square and we sat having sushi and i'd love sushi from being in la in the old days of rock and roll and he said i said what about sushi you know things that happen in america come over to england five years later a bit shorter these days and he said what you should do simon is a conveyor belt sushi bar and this was pre-internet and um in that moment you know i imagined the train set or going around the dining room table with the marmalade on it you know and i and i sort of went away and researched it and very expensive phone calls later and ended up in japan and found out there were two and a half thousand of these things in japan and they began since 1960s and we'd never heard of them you know and i thought i thought at any moment there's going to be a sort of terence conran or Gordon Ramsay, the grown-ups coming around the corner, you know, and I'd better get a move on.

10:47Simon Woodroffe:That was what happened. Of course, you take a concept like that, which pre-internet, pre-travel, when Japan seemed like a long, long way away. Great mystery of the East. Real mystery. And you bring it back to London. Trying to explain the idea, trying to sell the idea to people must have been quite the challenge. I mean, a challenge that I'm sure you enjoyed, but quite the challenge to get people to sort of buy into what it could be. Well, you talked about enthusiasm earlier. And I think I had, I really believed it. I could imagine what this was like in Japan. They were sort of cheap, like a happy eater on the side of the A1, you know, it's a cafe.

11:25Simon Woodroffe:And I could imagine this being a big event. And I wanted to have a big site, which I did eventually get in Soho. And that was the key to it. And I think that people believe me. And if you can convince yourself, and I have this thing about, you know, you've got to take a research period, three months is nearly 100 days. If you chip off 1 % a day, you get it. And I really believed that it was going to be a big deal. And I think when I spoke to people, I didn't hide behind my business plan. My business plan actually said on the front of it, it says, if you want to make God laugh, show me a business plan.

11:56Simon Woodroffe:And they said, you can't show that to the bank. And the bank said, well, actually, it's very realistic. We quite like it. And I really believed it. And so I could talk to people about it. And really, the couple was one was the manager at NatWest Bank who gave me a loan to add to the little bit of cash that I had. And the other was the Jewish owner of the Manny Davidson, who gave me my first sight in the West End and believed in it and said, well, we're going to give him a go because this could be big, boy. This could be big, boy. Meet this guy, Simon. Amazing. How many people do you think you pitched it to who said it's never going to work before you found the ones that believed in it?

12:33Simon Woodroffe:I mean, I talked to a lot of nearsayers. You know, everybody had a reason why it wouldn't work. You know, people are going to, you know, they're going to steal things off the conveyor belt. They get a thing. What happens if a conveyor belt breaks down? You know, and one of the things that I've learned is that you want to listen to everybody, even the people I call the C word, the consultants. You know, you don't want to listen to everybody, but you're allowed to filter what comes in, what you take in, what you put to one side and what you actually use. And so I listened to all those people, but I had a confidence.

13:07Simon Woodroffe:I had a sort of, you know, it was, you know, probably a bit of a delusion at one point, but I did believe it myself. And that's what makes the difference. So you've managed to get the money together. You found a location on Poland Street where the original Yo Su Su was. Which you came to, I believe. Which I did come to, yeah. In the early days. after it after it opened but and i walked past on a number of occasions far too scared to go in because i had no idea what it was like this concept it was extraordinary which was the which was the point and it's interesting once we get to the launch of the business the struggle you had to get people through the door because everybody's like what earth is that place can the public go in there is that is there robots selling drinks it was it was like some crazy dream really um but were there moments before you got to the point where the doors open where you thought i've bitten off more than i can chew here well i had everything on the line which i think if you're doing a startup and you're asking other people and i was asking other people to invest that thing i ended up not needing them but i was asking people you've got to have everything that you've got in the world you've got to hurt more than they're going to hurt and so in that i was going to open at the end of one year and i actually i got the rug pulled from underneath me at the end of the first year and i opened in the end of the second year which is when all the things happen the conveyor the the robots the whole bit and um i believed it i think for 90 percent of the time and five percent was quite a bit of doubt and five percent was nights of you know nightmares and sheer terror and i've been how could you even think that you could do something like this but i recovered each time and and i just kept kept on and and it happened i mean there is that moment as well though in the book and you talk about it and i can remember thinking while you're telling me this story like that's it right is where you've got the poland street location everything's sorted and then suddenly the building gets sold to some new owners that's right and you're like hold on and it's like well we can't have that location now after all that work and all that time the perfect spot you knew exactly where it was and then all of a sudden the people that are going to give you the space they've sold it to somebody else and now you've got a whole Then you're thinking, well, we need another location.

15:19Then I think you decided, no, no, no, I'm going to find the new owners, which was never as easy. These days, you just look it up. It'd be super easy. I've got to find these new owners. I've got to persuade them that this is a good answer.

15:29Simon Woodroffe:That's exactly what happened. That's exactly right. I call them showstoppers. And you know what it is. You're doing something new. And there's always somebody who comes along. You know, we had the health and safety people. You can't have food going around. I can bear the fire people saying you can't have open kitchens and all of that business. And they were showstoppers. And I always say you have to go around stone walls. And I love the idea, the sort of mental image of build golden bridges that people can walk over to. So you just keep on going and you just pretend that that hasn't happened. And it's unbelievable if you do keep going.

16:03Simon Woodroffe:I mean, look, you've got to never be late to quit and cut bait is one of the things, you know, if you want, when you get out. And I have got out of things in my time and lost lots of money doing it. but if you believe it keep going because it will happen

16:28Hello it's Elizabeth Day from How to Fail here my next guest is the award winning investigative journalist and best selling author acclaimed for his deep dives into subjects like the troubles in Say Nothing and corporate power in Empire of Pain Yes, it's Patrick Radden Keefe. We talk about families. We talk about the stories we tell ourselves and how to write them. And then there's this.

16:51Simon Woodroffe:The legal threats don't scare me. I will say I get a lot of those. The people, the gangsters never threaten me in a kind of outright way. Listen to How to Fail wherever you get your podcasts.

17:10so talk to me about that moment when you finally because you kept it all a secret you kept the walls the the front window hidden you kept everything hidden when you finally unveil it and you open the restaurant what's that moment like when this this dream and this this crazy

17:26Simon Woodroffe:idea has become a reality well i sort of you know we had these robots are just two weeks before we opened i'd got these robots i've got brilliant stages who are a company who do the big rock shows and they're delivered these these robotic drinks trolleys which drove around the restaurant they had a voice on my voice actually i recorded to save money on an actor and one of them was um an american voice my voice american said it is as this one drove around the corner after it was delivered it said move your fat ass somebody's got a freaking job to do it said job i think it said actually and the american tourists were going did you hear what it said to me joe you know i mean people couldn't believe it but um that moment when it opened really people didn't come and um i even i don't think i tell the story in the book but i even got one of those things on oxford street with a thing saying sushi this way i was that desperate i actually i actually did that yeah and um anyway it didn't and um we got to the second saturday and i was having sleepless nights you know and then the second saturday i was downstairs trying to keep myself busy i hope people are going to come here in the office and bruce isaacs who's the opening manager came down he beckoned to me like this and he said come up and we came up and there was a queue down the block and it was like the relief was enormous because it was pre-internet there was no Facebook or anything like that.

18:55Simon Woodroffe:No Instagram to tell people, yeah. Exactly. But word of mouth had gone out. And whether it's word of mouth on Instagram or word of mouth, the real old-fashioned word of mouth, it had gone out. And people said, you've got to go and see this. And they all came and all the pop stars came and everybody was in there. And Jonathan Russ was in every day on his little Union Jack scooter. And, you know, it was a scene. It was a real scene. And we had that queue for five years. and everybody was in there. But everybody was equal. You know, you've got the MTV kids sitting next to the skateboarders, sitting next to the ladies who lunch, sitting next to the business guys in the suits and the media crowd, like yourself, you know, coming in.

19:37Simon Woodroffe:And it was a scene and everybody was kind of equal and laughing about the fact they were eating off a conveyor belt and, you know, it's like being in a factory. And robots serving you drinks. That's right. That would tell you to move your fat ass. Yes, exactly. Because you've got a job to do. Exactly. Do you look back and think, and I know that we learned through our failings, but there are moments along the way you thought that was a big mistake and we shouldn't have done it like that. Or if I could go back, I would have done that differently. I don't have, I mean, we did make a lot of mistakes.

20:07Simon Woodroffe:We opened in some really stupid places. I thought if we opened anywhere, we'd be so successful in that backwater in Soho. I thought we could open off site, get cheap sites, all of that. We went up to Edinburgh, which is miles away, and opened in a completely wrong place. And that put us back two years and we lost a lot of money. So there were lots of practical mistakes like that. But generally, I think I was very lucky because the timing was just right. Pret had just had their second restaurant, their second Pret and Manger open. They started selling sushi as a small bit. There was this, it had always been very Japanesey.

20:46Simon Woodroffe:there was something kind of quite sexy about it you know the timing was exactly right so that bit was lucky um but i think i did a i made it showbiz yeah and and that's what made it work and i didn't think of it as a restaurant you know people come and pitch me today and they go i've got this great idea it's going to be chicken but the sauce is really fantastic and i'm going it doesn't really matter about the sauce i mean the sauce has got to be good it's got to be great great great everything that's got to be great about you know so much competition these days but you've got to have what i used to call the in you know in show business they used to say there's a ziz in showbiz you know it's quite sort of you know sickening really but they're right and there's a ziz in everything and i think the kids are learning that now that everybody's looking for that ziz i think you described yourself at some points as having chutzpah and there's a couple of brilliant bits of marketing that you did where basically on the menus you put your sponsors down I think as uh the airline Sony Honda and all Nepal Airlines who didn't give me very much no but I I put them over everything it was just an instinctive thing to do and was it was it Honda that you basically contacted Honda and said I'd like to put you on the menus and as long as they didn't say no which they didn't say no i didn't even sell them i was going to put them on the menu i said i want to make you my they lent me one of those honda jarro canopies and we ended up with like a three-wheeler three-wheeler they we ended up with 10 of them running around it was like a tactic thing and um i said i wrote to them and i said dear honda motorcycle to you i'm so grateful for you for lending me this thing i'm going to make you my official sponsor if i don't hear back from the next seven days i'll assume you agree of course a big company never wrote back to me and i did that to all of them so i had them over everything people going around have you seen who's backing him i mean how did he pull that off you know they just lent it this me this bike and that's the brilliance though because you had a bit of a cash flow problem yeah and then you went to your supplier and you said can you just explain how you got that funding it was a funny thing i say is yeah the someone's like the balls of somebody to go and speak to the supplier and say i tell you what why don't you lend me the money i owe you that's exactly what i said to them yeah and and uh the guy just laughed and he he said uh we said i'll ask them if i'll give you some extended credit and he said that the the guy who owned the company it was actually the people who put all the conveyors and everything and then he said um so the guy he was a hard nut he wasn't going to give anything away to anybody and he said he said lads he said they're going to do loads of these places i want you to be in on all of it and he said he said it's safe as houses the money because you know who's backing them don't you sony honda and nippon airlines and i hadn't planned any of it it's just that just kind of the way it worked out it's amazing isn't it the blag of that that lent to their confidence yes which set everything up and allowed you to succeed it's what is what you could call a confidence trick in the very best meaning of that word um so how did you go about crafting a brand that was so bold so different and also and this i think is crucially crucial ultimately so recognizable well i didn't get um an advertising agency and we didn't sit down and plan 10 years of how we were going to develop a brand but i went to a guy called who would give a lot of credit really with yo i i have a list of all these different names sushi circus this that and the other and yo sushi was a girl who used to come in my office and she used to go yo you know and i thought it sounded good and everybody said what a stupid name but mark norton who's actually the only guy ever to have done two rolling stones album covers because they're so apart from andy warhol i think they're so demanding as characters and he did as an album cover designer graphics and he um he actually and the other guy called um graham graham sturt and they actually designed it and we walked in one day you know pre kind of computers and they'd had it all on this board and it was yo rather like you see the yo logo now and it was a beautifully done logo but they set it against a um a neon lit tokyo background and what we showed it people people said that's great and so we showed some japanese people and they said oh no and it turned out it was the red light district in in tokyo so we had no idea which these days is really cool right i suppose it would have been everyone would go that's really sexy but in those days you it was a very no no cd bad cd yeah so anyway that he did it and he always said he said yo was always destined to be a brand in all sorts of things like virgin i suppose he meant and just happened to be a sushi bar in its first manifestation uh you know the in those days the virgin was going into lots of things lots of which didn't work but some of which did obviously and um and there was easy and easy was going into hotels and rental cars and you know the same thing and i thought well you know there's nobody else doing it but you know could be the third one and i've you know i've done in the hotels i've done i've had a fashion brand it hasn't gone as far as i thought you know i started pretty late in life i was 47 yeah well exactly yeah that is true i had a few things but um you know and i think it still could go on to do lots more but um it's interesting that there weren't so many people trying to use the same name because conventional thinking was you don't want to do something else because it might not be as good as the first one and then it would bring the other one down that was the the old-fashioned thinking what do you think it is about you know then that that means it can cut across age class and culture i mean it was such a cool scene at the start but it didn't mean that the public could come in as well and they felt like they got something really exciting well i think i think it's a very good word of course it rhymes with lots of things yota go yo below you know whatever it was and um it had a lot of what those modern brands later did which is it's cheeky and it was you know radical and it changed things and all of that um but i think the thing that i wanted it to be and when i look back it was innovative whatever it went into it it really tried to do something radically different and i've never been in restaurants in my life so people used to say oh we don't do the things like that in the restaurant business and i say well we're doing it now because we're going to do it my way it was a bit so steve jobs was had this thing of it's my way or the highway you know i want it done by five o 'clock and i want it done now and i think that was me at that time as you You know, I think megalomaniac control of something at the very beginning of the outset is absolutely the way to do it.

27:30Simon Woodroffe:But to hand it over, as I did, to Robin Rowland eventually to actually expand it out. It was the other thing that I did, which was clever, was not to kind of hang on to my baby. I went off to do the next one.

27:54summon yo sushi to yo tells that's a pretty wild leap how did you go from one to the other well it

28:00Simon Woodroffe:isn't isn't i mean um i handed the the business to robin in fact i think robin said to me robin said look you're really good yeah i could never have opened yo sushi but you know it needs somebody like me to take it on to the next part and he said i said i don't think he said he might have even said you change your mind all the time and if you don't kind of stop it and let me have a go at it I might leave um I think he might have said something along those lines and so I said well you know you go for it and they went oh you'll never let go you're too much of a control freak and I absolutely did and I thought I'll show you and I did and it wobbled at the beginning and then he took it on and sort of built it out really and I went and locked my door and I had an office next store and got my pad of paper out because i draw and i started drawing up what a hotel would look like and i got hooked on it so i used that as a bit like sort of you know getting yourself off drugs you know i i sort of got myself yeah going cold turkey and i got myself a new girlfriend and my new girlfriend was the hotel and i started developing that and we actually you know the first thing i did and i'm a big believer in prototyping things and we built a polystyrene model in our car park and put it up and people you know my friends were walking and going this is amazing this is amazing if i'd done research on that saying would you like to sleep in a seven square meter room with no natural light people's not going to walk in but when they walked in there they went this is so obvious why didn't somebody do this before if you build it they will come because yes i mean when you uh before you sort of your design business when you were designing sets and stages some of those sets that you built for some of those rock bands aussie osborne and and the people you were looking after, they would buy the sets that you'd made off.

29:41Yeah. I mean, it was a great way of creating the vision that you were trying to sell them in with. Yeah, that's right.

29:47Simon Woodroffe:It was before computer graphics. Yeah. So we started off with airbrush sort of paintings, which were rather beautiful things. Everybody wanted, pop stars wanted, you know, they had the gold disc in the hall and then the picture of the stage show. And then we started doing three-dimensional models and we built some amazing ones. I remember we were doing one for ACDC and they had a big bell that came down and the bell came down and it rang on the model. And we did one for Queen, actually. And when you press the button on the side, it came in a great big flight case and you opened it. And it was just a model of this great stage.

30:20Simon Woodroffe:You press the button and it sang, We Are the Champions. You know, and you can imagine that Freddie's going, I won that at home. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I did love the story. I'm sort of digressing, but I did love the story about the rake on the stage. And one of the stars you'd built the rake for absolutely loved it, but didn't Freddie turn around? You'd built one for Queen. I didn't build it. Somebody else built one. No, I built a very raked stage for Robert Plant. That's right, yes. They had all the backstage areas underneath the stage. And as he moved up and down this very steeply raked stage, of course, in the stadiums, it looked amazing because it looked like he was going up and down.

30:55Simon Woodroffe:And somebody did one for John McGraw in Los Angeles, did one for Freddie Mercury. And Freddie came in on the first day and he walked up and down it a few times. He said, what do you think I am, a mountain goat? you can take it away take it away doing that can't you um now i think one of the things that that i think it's really really pertinent to this is is how fast culture and trends move i mean yo sushi was a very trendy concept i mean it was ahead of that in in many ways you know tell all of these things how do you manage to stay ahead of that that shift in where people's interests and excitement is and their tastes go in order to keep it relevant keep it trendy to keep it sort of viable well you know it's a very good point i mean yotel have done it very well they're continually innovating and doing new hotels because they're building new hotels what yosushi did was to go into the supermarkets and i think there's 400 outlets in supermarkets with our own people in there so they've done it in their way um i wanted them and i've i still i wanted them to reinvent automation you know because vending for example has got such a bad rap nobody likes it but if you could reinvent that you know with all the problems of you know wages and people and all of that if you could reinvent that you and make it really exciting for people everybody would want to go and you know is perfectly positioned to do that but today they haven't done that so um maybe somebody listening will will do their thing um my line was can i c a A-N-I, question mark, constant and never-ending innovation or improvement.