From prison to Dragon's Den: the man who built Yo Sushi | Simon Woodroffe

14:57Simon Woodroffe:what it was and and i was lucky because and i am lucky today because you know the creative side came first the imaginative part but i learned the business side and i thoroughly enjoy i enjoy the business side everybody's and the money and all of that have a good relationship with my and the two but what actually happened for me after richmond and royal court is that if you knew your stage left from your stage right you're an expert and rock and roll had just started becoming show yes you know in the early days it was rock and roll and showbiz and there were the twain should meet and i went and did lighting and eventually started a lighting company and you know it was i can't think of the word to describe it you know when there's no rules around you know it was it was it was anarchy and um we would we could do that and people wanted to come to rock shows and the bands wanted to have big lights and all of that and so we invented that business i was the very beginning of that world having your first business how old are you at this point i am 74

15:55Olly Fawcett:today and sorry not at this point how old are you now that was like foot in your face okay busted

16:04Simon Woodroffe:um how old are you when you start the licensing company um i i suppose 28 something like that

16:09Olly Fawcett:wow so you're still i mean you're still young because i mean in back back in those days starting

16:14Simon Woodroffe:a business that young was quite rare no it was very rare and and actually in those days you know until the beatles came along a few years earlier yeah you couldn't get on the front page of a newspaper unless you were 50 you know and you couldn't start a business so yes i did there was a guy called ricky far who i'd met in the he was he did a sound company and he was the son of a pre-war boxer called big guy tommy far and um ricky had put on the first isle of white festivals and the same one that's still today the same one i say wow and he he was into sound systems and he said you need to do a lighting thing we did he got the gig to do the first rod stewart

16:53Olly Fawcett:tour after rod left the faces wow who i'd actually worked for a bit not that i really knew him in

16:58Simon Woodroffe:those days because i did the on-stage spotlight you know he's i saw the faces were incredible band in the early days anyway rod did this this tour we got the job to do the lighting and i remember going in to see them early on see his manager billy gaff and he said rod wants a big white stage like he's seen when he goes to the theater he loves going to the theater and seeing and all that stuff with the white curtains right rostrum a big right so ramp he can run around on and i could draw and i'd driven the richmond theater van which you've probably seen running around richmond and so i knew where to get the drapes and the scenery made and all that stuff and i said put the whole package together and charge the design fee and went in and got somebody to do an airbrush painting pre um pre-computer graphics and and billy said rod rod come and have a look at this come around rod comes in and he goes that's what i've always wanted he said if it can travel and that was the deal because these shows had to travel you couldn't just invent something that looked good it was about the mechanics and the engineering and i was a sort of amateur engineering i always liked all that stuff you know how do you build things it was before the lighting trusses had been invented and all of that and we built this stage and it went out of the room and i made a profit and i remember going out to dinner a few weeks later and somebody saying uh saying what do you do for a living and i said actually i'm a stage designer they said oh how interesting theater yeah what what what have you done recently i said just done the doing the new rod stewart show oh wow you know that's interesting you know so suddenly it was like well you know act as if you're somebody and you become it yeah it's interesting your ability to

18:34Olly Fawcett:learn skills and have the confidence to go into something you don't even know anything about in in the grand scheme of things right doing a thing for rod starting the company to start with was that all coming naturally to you or were you just pushing yourself outside of a comfort zone at

18:46Simon Woodroffe:all times i think i was stepping outside the comfort zone um i think there was a bit of needs must you know nothing to fall back on um i think in those days you could do that a bit but in in many ways you could do that more today because actually running a small and starting a small business you don't need to get an expert on this that and the other you can look everything up i learned cad drawing i learned how to do sage accounting when i started out you know i learned diy everything because the trouble is in the early days nobody can ever do anything as good as you can i mean later on you get into a situation where you can hire people who are better than you which is kind of a hard thing to do very hard but and then later on you also realize and i'm i'm looking at my host here ollie and i'm sure he'll agree but you know in the early days you believe when you're younger you believe that you know better than everybody else of course but later you

19:40Olly Fawcett:realize that that is sometimes the delusion yeah yeah i mean deeply deeply delusional yeah yeah no for sure i mean do you think if you were starting that lighting company in 2026 at 28 do you think it's way easier now considering how hard it was back then for you i i think there's pros and cons

20:00Simon Woodroffe:but um i don't think it really is relevant whether it's easy or not what's relevant is that we are in now yeah and for sure there are lots and lots of opportunities now and so there's no point in many ways in in the comparison in in making the conspiracy i guess there's lots of things and and you you might say that to get that job in the theater i'd have to do a training course but by the same token if you go out around the corner of the theater and they need somebody that afternoon

20:27Olly Fawcett:you can get in the back door do you think hard work does beat talent truth is the harder you work the more that you sweat the luckier you get great saying so you spent 30 years in the kind of music and music and tv space as well i know you looked in there and then you walked away from it

20:46Simon Woodroffe:i you say i walked away from it i i got lost when i left school i got lost when i came out of prison i got lost when i uh got out of the rock and roll business i got and i went into the i started selling television rights yeah rock and roll i got out of in 85 which was the year of live aid which is the last big show we did as a company in terms of the tv production side and um and um you know i was in the tv business then selling television rights to rock shows pre-mtv and then there's that all emerged um so yeah what was the question what made you get out the industry what made you get out yeah so each time i mean live aid 1985 suddenly the business which had been run by sort of mavericks was run that's starting to be run by accountants and the whole thing was starting to grow up and be more professional really right and i remember that i'm proud of what i did did then but i remember thinking um um you know i'm sure you you and your listeners have never had that thought but i thought i've got to get out of this business before i get found out you know and that's what it felt like wow and then i was in the even off to 30 years well that was after about 15 years i suppose and then i was in the television business and we winged that as well really because we knew the managers of the groups and billy joel's manager just filmed billy joel had gone to russia simon napier bell manager of wham had uh they'd gone to china and he'd said let's film it just in case we can never get it on telly because you can never get anything on telly like that in those days and elf and john had just done the same with billy after done filmed the show in in uh with an orchestra in australia and we went to the managers and said look we could we could sell those television rights we could sell them to tv yeah as long as you get them on tv we don't even mind if you don't get any money for it we went okay and so we we went we got ourselves so we bought ourselves a ticket to go to one of the television festivals in can and one in monte carlo mitcom and all those things you know where they where the film festival is and uh we just looked up in the book who were the buyers for entertainment and went and knocked on their stall door and said we've got these rock shows and they're oh we don't do rock shows i said but look you don't have to dub them we're doing it we can do a good price for you put them out at late night and they're going that is a good idea so they went to their controllers and suddenly rock shows started to be late night television then they became in time they became mainstream and then event televisions happened you know our post um live aid which is the first big television event there was nelson mandela shows the prince of world's trust shows and we represented those and sold them all over the world and now that was really where we we made our thing it was live television event tv as the technology started to exist to be able to do

23:36Olly Fawcett:live broadcasts wow revolutionary it was it was and then you decided to leave that and then the

23:43Simon Woodroffe:same thing you know i burnt a few bridges and um burnt a few bridges yeah okay oh god i shouldn't have said that you're gonna pick me up on that one yeah bust it no i did you know i i am i think you know i was still a loud mouth and and um and you know and again the world had grown up and the the big wigs pmi emis group virgin they're all getting in on the thing yeah i thought you know i thought the same thing really i'm going to get out and have a go at something else and i was in the in the in the pits for a while and then i actually got i was going to go into extreme sports do the same thing with television rights for extreme sports and i was ended up producing a show for a pan-european television station called super channel i don't know what it was called but it was extreme sports in the early days before red bull got there got a look in on the whole thing and i could have stayed in that and i mean that would have been a very good business to be in and i sort of knew it was going to be but somehow it didn't happen and then i got divorced and that threw me to my knees and then i thought to hell with all of this and i'd actually made when i was with that super channel thing i'd got a kind of royalty thing coming in the first time i really touched on royalties and i had enough money to live on for a couple of years so i thought i'll go down to chamonix because i was into rock climbing and mountaineering and all of that sort of stuff sailing so i went down there and lived i thought i'll have a simple life pre-airbnb i'll buy flats and rent it out and you know just live a simple life and none of this ambition anymore and i went down there in my dad's voxelastra after he died he gave to me inherited and and you know lived a simple life and then but it was there was something just gnawing me you can do something you can do and i came back to london i was going to do indoor rock climbing i was going to do a chauffeur company i was going to do removals i mean it could have been anything and it just happened that i met this guy um toro uohara who is a who i'd known from the tv business from a music show in japan called it's studio deluxe which is like american bandstand which is the old top of the pops type thing and he said what you should do simon is a conveyor belt sushi

25:54Olly Fawcett:bar and it was like whoa that's very what are you talking about we'll get to that okay what i want to ask you about first is a little bit of advice because i feel like what you mentioned there about all the ideas right and what i call the magpie effect what i call what a lot of people call the magpie effect right when you're an entrepreneur and when you're a business owner if you've got something already or you've you know about to found something or you haven't yet and you've got all these ideas how do you know what the right idea is without trying all of them and wasting

26:21Simon Woodroffe:all your time what's the advice you would give to someone well my way is to have a whole lot of things on the go you know i always kept a notebook of all the ideas you know where do you find ideas for a kickoff you know i'm forever looking around the world at everything thinking how could i do this better that is really annoying how that could be that improved and i love that conversation about how those things are so then i'd have a whole lot of things on the go and i'd start what i call developing them and developing means spending some time on it starting to write stuff down go and talk to people who know that world putting time and a bit of money in if you have to get an aeroporting to go somewhere putting small amounts of money in but living off nothing living off very very little right and when something comes to the forefront which eventually conveyor belt sushi bar which pre-internet nobody had ever heard of it came into my mind and in my mind it was like sort of you know the um you know the my hornby double o railway track going around the dining room table with a marmalade on it you know is that sort of thing i thought oh god this sounds pretty interesting yeah when it came to the forefront i remember giving myself um a hundred days three months okay go and do the research one percent a day and put some money into it and at the end of three months you know that negative voice that said this is all good this has got a million things that's going to go wrong put it up on the whiteboard everybody's going to criticize it and you know all of that that negative voice was gone i had a new voice waking me up this voice is going you're going to be very very rich and very very famous and very very successful which you know actually is a delusion but it jump gets you jumping out of bed in the morning and so i think that's how i've developed things and then i've got the three second rule and the three second rule is that when you get that negative voice about it not working one two three you've got to move on and keep it going but at the end of three months it's not working quit and cut bait get out and go and do something else yeah but at least give the thing the chance

28:27Olly Fawcett:so that you don't how do you how do you know an idea has got legs to it

28:32Simon Woodroffe:that isn't just your ego talking well you know that's uh interesting that you equate those two things together is it a good idea and is it the yeah i think do you know what

28:45Olly Fawcett:because we speak about a lot on the show like i love the naivety of starting something like when i started my business i was 17 years old i was naive as hell i thought it was going to be the easiest thing ever and that is the beautiful time i don't think you ever get that back personally because you as you learn and as you experience negativity positivity you become more realism and the dreamlike state of building a business i think sometimes shifts and moves so for me when i've you know i've been involved in in other businesses and other opportunities etc and i've always questioned myself of is this me thinking this is a good idea or is it actually got legs to it and and sometimes you know people say do the market research be on the ground there's so many factors that you can do to test if an idea is good i guess it comes to your shoots sorry is when you know that it's got enough to it to really give it your all i think you know

29:36Simon Woodroffe:i'm not sure about the market research nothing small businesses but you know i did a little bit of this that and the other um you know if i'd said mind you if i said do you want to eat raw fish off conveyor belts with robots serving the drinks they're not going to say yes or when i started the hotel if i'd said would you like to sleep in a seven square meter room where the window is facing the corridors there's no natural light people aren't going to go oh yeah that's what i always wanted you know yeah yeah um but i'd lived in california i saw sushi happening i knew that whatever happened in america happened five years later probably a year still exists today business today so it's worth going to have a look at those things and then bring them over a lot of people who bought franchises over in america you know not very much harder to do it the other way around which actually we have done but um you know but i don't know that you ever do really know i got to um i've got to the opening of the things and you know 90 of the time i'm really gonna i'm really a believer that people are gonna if i do something it's outrageous it has a ziz to it that people are going to walk in and have a look at this in some form, whatever that is.

30:41Simon Woodroffe:But you never really know until you do the thing. Then the other 10 % maybe is sleepless nights and sheer terror. You know, that I made a terrible mistake. So you don't really know. But if you don't know, don't do anything and wait unless you know you're a procrastinator, in which case then get on with it. and in terms of taking risks i'm not everybody's always said you're a risk taker simon clearly i am and i have taken risks but i want to cover my ass at everything i'm always on about you only succeed by failing but i don't want to fail at all yeah that's the that you just know it's part of the process yes it's you've got to dust yourself off and yeah you know i'll even sort of you know you know when i had a few failures in the bag i punched the air so saying yeah good i'm on the right track but really i don't want to fail at all and i want to be very conservative and very sensible about money i don't want to spend a penny more than i need to interesting the the first kind

31:41Olly Fawcett:of day week month knowing that you were going to start to bill yo what was what was the thing that made you go all in well i think um when the guy told me about conveyor belt sushi in japan he said

32:00Simon Woodroffe:those words the next morning i woke up early yeah and i i figured that the japanese embassy would work out quite early so i called them about eight o 'clock i got through to a girl and i said could i speak to your commercial department and said not until nine o 'clock so i called back at nine o 'clock and you know they just giggled at the other end you know oh you got a fish and chips for japan oh yes and um they weren't much help at all and then in those days you couldn't just phone up japan it got a fortune for a kickoff and they're very expensive to get a ticket to go out there so how the hell was i so i started writing letters and sending telexes and faxes off to japan you know to find out about this and one day a few couple of months later i was in my little west london fat and this envelope comes through the door one morning and it's a padded envelope with japanese calligraphy on the front and a little bits of japanese string wound up and um um i open it and inside there's this a brochure in japanese it's got these pictures of this conveyor belt of sushi and it was i mean i couldn't believe it they looked amazing they were calves actually but they really and there were two and a half thousand and then one a few weeks later another one came through and it was english rather bad english they've been trying to sell it to into malaysia or somewhere and um it said how to start your own conveyor belt sushi bar had names and suppliers and contacts and spreadsheets and it was like everything was there it was a how to open this this thing and nobody had ever heard of this thing and i thought to myself actually what i thought to myself i thought i hope nobody knows about restaurants has seen this brochure because i'm holding a piece of magic here and that's what made me put my money in my hand in my pocket i didn't have a lot of money and i get on an airplane go to japan and i discovered the two and a half thousand these convertible sushi bars in japan i went to the Japanese food machinery exhibition and I'd been in you know studios in California for Ozzy Osbourne's new show and for Ron all these people and I'd been around showbiz but going to the sushi hall in the Mese Hala in Tokyo and walking in and seeing this machinery and the sushi making rising and mixing them was just like mind-blowing and that moment I was totally totally convinced that I could take this cafe idea that they had in Japan and bring it back to England and make it into a big fashionable thing.

34:30Olly Fawcett:And what was the element that you thought would make it work? So the experience, the convenience, what was the aspect of seeing it?

34:38Simon Woodroffe:So you're an analyst. I didn't think about any of that. I didn't think about healthy, crazy. I just thought showbiz. This is showbiz. you know you're going to have an opening night when i was in theater they used to all the lobbies used to say they say oh there's a ziz in showbiz you know and i'd say there's a ziz in every business in the world and you know whatever you do today you know this whatever you do whatever your product is it's got to be great great great great great great great great it's very competitive world but there's got to be a ziz you've got to put your head above the parapet yeah and say we're here and this is interesting and that's what i did and in fact what i did marketing wise is not to um have great big press releases going out and this that and the other first of all it was very televisual so all the tvs never really wanted to come along welcome to the robot restaurant serving sushi and silicon chips and but i i didn't talk about how good the food was or how good the ambience was or what the price was like i didn't talk about any of that um i talked about the world and life and everything according to me like i'm talking to you now and about my showbiz background and aussie osborne and this that and it of course journalists absolutely loved it here's this kind of rock and roll showbizy thing showbiz comes to restaurants interesting so how do you i mean you officially

36:02Olly Fawcett:open in 1997 97 january 22nd wow and that opening week opening couple of weeks what happened what was the experience of that initial the initial introduction to the london because you're in

36:14Simon Woodroffe:central london is your first we're in we're in in perlin street which was a backwater in those days in in london soho right and we had a 30 meter front of glass in an old carpet warehouse and um um mark norton who's who who's a graphic designer who did a lot of album covers i knew him from that world he'd covered the whole of the front up in this orange paper and in black it said sushi kirin you know katakana you know different japanese words and we made all the workers go in the back door and they weren't allowed to tell anybody what was happening inside it so we kept it as a secret and people were walking past in soho going what is this place and one day we took all the paper down and you walked looked in and there were these robots going around and there's this enormous conveyor belt there's these guys in hats and and catering show business people didn't know what it was they were going what is this is this a restaurant is it a factory is it a marketing device and um nobody came in because everybody was too scared we were saying come on in you know and uh the first week and first week i did i really thought oh man and maybe i i just thought people want to have a look at this you know it was looking through the window it was too intimidating and the second saturday um my opening manager a guy called bruce isaacs came downstairs and he said beckoned me like this and he said he said come and have a look at this and we walked up the stairs and there was a queue down the block it was a hundred yards i may be exaggerating it was a very long queue and that queue lasted for five years and for five years yeah and and people were queuing up every night what changed it how did it shift it just it just word of mouth had got out you know people had heard about it and nobody really knew about sushi that there's three oh three pretz had opened and they sat a little corner selling a little bit of sushi apart from that nobody had heard of it and uh you know it was called yo sushi and of course we did other food as well apart from that but um people came in because they wanted to have some fun and they've been you know it was that sort of i think it was the magic of people saying you gotta come and overlook this place even if you don't like japanese food it's amazing it's fun you know and And it was kind of quite anarchic.

38:32Simon Woodroffe:And I let everybody, the chefs were shouting out yo. They were yoing and froing. And, yeah, people, you know, the staff. I remember one of the staff members, this girl stood up on the chair. You know, everybody was there. Because you've got the MTV kids sitting next to the ladies who lunch, sitting next to Jonathan Ross, sitting next to a pop star, sitting next to a suit, you know. And everybody was in the same thing, kind of giggling, that they had this conveyor belt. And this girl jumps up and she goes, it's it's my girlfriend's birthday today is celebrate with me it's just work for us they were allowed to do stuff like really yeah and i remember i remember telling uh harvey nichols was the second one we opened and i remember telling our staff one day i said look everybody who sits in that one of those seats if you multiply if they if you think that they're going to tell 10 people you know and you multiply it up they're each worth five ten twenty thousand pounds to us each one of those people yeah treat them real good even the difficult ones the ladies who lunch up there even the really difficult ones treat them good beep and you're enable you're empowered to give something away a beer or thing or so sorry we'll look after that yeah you said i said but if and they'll had their attention at that point this is to the staff and i said but if they really behave badly and i said and remember it's not you they're talking about it's they've got a problem from when they were young or whatever yeah i said if they really behaved badly tell them to fuck off we don't want your type around here and people's mad our staff's mouths were wide open nobody ever did obviously

40:03Olly Fawcett:but they knew that they were allowed to and i powers them yeah interesting going into the business into the obviously the restaurant business hospitality from your background beforehand i can see the connection now yeah you've you explained you can add the dots yeah it makes total sense obviously because i grew up with a studio so i can see i can see that connection but was there something that we found very surprising about the the hospitality industry and the restaurant game the food game that you didn't expect to to sort of foresee well they all

40:31Simon Woodroffe:said whatever i said and did they said we don't do that in the like that in the hospitality

40:36Olly Fawcett:interest whether it's uh whether it's uh tips or yeah split shifts or whatever it was and i and i

40:44Simon Woodroffe:said well let's just do it differently and i think people kind of quite liked it you know they they

40:49Olly Fawcett:were all right well you'll give it a go being being innovating in a space yes and coming into a new market it's quite a challenge and i've experienced this i wouldn't say i'm an innovator but i've experienced resistance to ideas when you're leading the charge how do you get buying

41:04Simon Woodroffe:from people are out of thing guys so it's your job to sell extent to do that but you also need to reflect your customers i think the biggest thing is obviously getting buy-in from those

41:14Olly Fawcett:around you around your ideas and i think that's where a lot of young founders actually struggle is that they have experiences and they spend more time on ideas and more time in a business whether it's a branded agency a restaurant whatever they're obsessed with it so when you've got a team and you need buy-in from the team that is going against the grain that they're used to

41:32Simon Woodroffe:how do you do that how do you personally if you're a megalomaniac control freak like i was and you own 90 % of the company, which I managed to do without a great deal of money. I'm happy to tell you that story later. Then you don't have to listen to all those nearsayers. You can decide to do something, and that's what I did. And because I knew that if it didn't work, change your mind and go and do something else the next week. Later, when you get bigger and more corporate, you've got more outlets and all of that, you've got to have much more of a system, and it's much harder to do but at the beginning you can try things out you know i always have said that restaurant's a big hit at the beginning it was like having a number one hit record you know and the um the money was rolling in and i was running the business so the money was rolling back out again because i had another um idea every day but actually that kind of worked yeah um so i think you know that that is in the early days it's much easier and then there's the other question i exposes how do you keep that spirit going yes further on yeah you know but if you build a strong spirit which i think we did with yo which was um innovation and a bit cheeky and and all of that stuff it becomes a fun thing when i go into the hotels especially but it is usually even today i can see a lot of the stuff that i put in place is still reiterated not least because the staff are kind of quite proud of the place you know they're proud of what they're doing and they're

43:03Olly Fawcett:proud that it's different it's such a nice feeling that is there when you've got a team that are proud of what they're building it's it gives you so much energy as a founder right yeah it is true

43:12Simon Woodroffe:i actually saw a stephen bartlett thing uh him showing around his organization and there was just i actually felt quite jealous because he just had a whole bunch of people lots of different departments but all of them were very very positive and enthusiastic and i believed him actually i don't think he set him up well i've got one of his team coming on the show very soon

43:33Olly Fawcett:have you yes i mean i'm excited to to find more because you know he's put culture at the heart of his businesses right and that's been seems to be absolutely right you know he's the elon musk

43:42Simon Woodroffe:of our time it's totally different character and spirit of doing it he's absolutely intent on spending his money and putting all his money back into building something that's big and influential yeah i'm a big big fan of his he's not inviting me on so i'm i'm slightly we've got a bit of history between us actually it goes back there is a bit yeah but um can you share anything on that? Not really. I've known him since he was a young boy actually. Oh fantastic. So maybe that's it or maybe there's just more interesting people that come along at the wrong time because he can interview the politicians of that.

44:17Simon Woodroffe:He just interviewed J.D. Vance.

44:19Olly Fawcett:Yeah I saw that. Yeah very interesting.

44:21Simon Woodroffe:He interviewed Anthony Robbins who was a big influence on me. Speaking of hard feelings that's for sure. Good.

44:28Olly Fawcett:Speaking of money and you mentioned there's a story there getting the money to open the restaurant the first one you needed quite a bit but did you have any cash from your previous business

44:37Simon Woodroffe:and that structure or are you starting from zero all right i had 200 grand tied up in my flat because they've right gone up in value i'd spent the rest um so i had that 200 grand um there was a government loan guarantee scheme that tony blur and gordon brown had put in place thank you very much to vote for those gentlemen um and i got that from the bank the bank guaranteed another 200 grand the government the deal was that if you put everything you have in the world into a business as an individual as an individual yeah and um the government would guarantee seven and the bank would have lent you the money if i had collateral to back it up okay which you did with the flat no i didn't because i already put that money in as actual money yeah um then the government would guarantee 70 % of it if the bank would guarantee the other 30 % of my bank manager um I actually there was an I wasn't the first person to do a conveyor belt sushi bar another one opened in a very small one in Liverpool Street Station and I went oh no they've kicked me to the post but it was great because I took my bank manager along and nobody had ever heard of this other one and I showed it to him he said this is amazing he said I'm gonna have a bloody good go and so that I had that I had some very expensive leasing which is another 100 grand and I built a million pound restaurant with half a million quid because i did everything myself um you know i even paid the carpenters i did a lot of the drawing myself all of that stuff yeah and and we managed to get to opening and actually what happened i will tell you is that i'd gone out because from my tv days i'd gone out and got sort of quasi sponsorship actually i've asked sony to give me a few old big square box tvs so i can put japanese tv on at the front of the restaurant says you walk past just that's cool this japanese thing and then um all nippon airlines have upgraded me once when i went to japan on my second joke that's all we did the upgrade in the days when you could get upgrades like that and all nippon airlines and and sony motorcycles uk lent me one of the honda jaro canopy motorbikes which we painted up yes which we later had 10 of them and and i remember writing to honda and saying i'm so grateful to you for lending me this bike that i'm going to make you one of my official sponsors and if i don't hear back in the next seven days i'll assume you agree of course they're a big company never wrote back to me so i had three spots i put them over everything they were on the menus have you been to a restaurant it's got sponsors on the menus across the front of the restaurant all of that stuff and people people thought in fact i asked my biggest supplier i said a bit of humor always helps i said i said would you lend me the money to pay your bill and they laughed and i said you know i'm serious actually give me some extended credit and the guy came back to me a couple of weeks later he said our boss has told us to give you that extended credit if you get if you make sure you give us the next project harvey nichols project and i said no problem at all i said um and i asked him a few years later i said why did you do that because you're he said our boss is real tight ass he never gave anything to anybody yeah he said lads he said this is good good business for us he said you know who's backing them don't you

47:57Olly Fawcett:sony honda and all nippon airlines the money's completely safe so the perception was everything

48:03Simon Woodroffe:yeah the showbiz i didn't plan it that way but you know everybody thought well it was yeah it was it was just i just you know i'm a believer we were talking about it earlier yeah always over deliver to everybody and i was i genuinely wanted to do the best for sody honda and all and up on airlines what i actually got is everybody thinking that they were our backers or somehow involved

48:24Olly Fawcett:yeah yeah definitely and so over the next sort of five to six years the business just grew and grew

48:30Simon Woodroffe:yeah it did you know it opened and the money was rolling in and and um and obviously as with any small business that's when all the problems started you know because there's there's people overhead begs and it walks on two legs sort of thing and um you know we we did with the second call we one we did was harvey nichols then we did selfridge's food hall it's three very good ones another one in finchley road and then i thought well we can open anywhere and we opened in edinburgh totally off pitch and even no edinburgh and you know i thought we opened anyway everybody flock in and they didn't and that held us way back and then i got robin roland in who was uh who is the operations director and he eventually he took over and took us into shopping miles which was a slightly anathema to me i just wanted to have big places everywhere like hard rock cafe take it around the world right but he wanted to do that and i said we'll go for it and and actually what where yo sushi has really grown is in shopping miles and also in supermarkets i think we're in the uk we're in well i think around the world we're in 600 supermarkets not just on the shelves but with our own staff and our own people in 600 around the world yeah wow as as the business

49:45Olly Fawcett:is starting to grow did did you feel at all out of your depth when it's growing that quickly when um because success is scary but you know i at that point i was good at letting go that's what

49:58Simon Woodroffe:i was really good at there's most people who build businesses that their babies never want to let go but i was willing to let go and i sold um fairly early on you know i think it's a restaurant number five or six i sold um this is 2003 no yeah that's right yeah i sold to primary capital and i i had 90 and and um i i made a bit of money a few million quid and and you know it was a great great relief you know like a pack of cards those things and then um i ended up 25 of that business and i made far more money out of that 25 than i did but i'd also negotiated a royalty deal yeah i made far more out of the royalty deal than i ever made out of the two exits where did the

50:44Olly Fawcett:royalty idea come from and just for those that don't know what that kind of deal structure would look like could you just explain what the royalty deal is i i i am when i started off actually we

50:54Simon Woodroffe:had one of my very small partners was always complaining about my wages i said i'll just take one percent of turnover and he said oh it's not very much that's all right yeah so what you mean when you get bigger it goes up a bit i said yeah he said that sounds very good for us so i wrote that into a contract with my small shareholders and when we got to the first exits i said that is non-negotiable i won't even enter into a conversation with you guys venture capitals unless that's in there and they believed me and um so the deal went through and when we got to 100 125 restaurants 600 stores you know that's a great deal of money it goes on to this day and where did it come from and obviously i saw it in the music business but actually came from a girl called mary allen who was my first girlfriend really and mary was an actress and she was in a marmite advert and in those days if you go it went to adverts you know because it was theatrical yeah yeah tradition you got a little royalty and she used to get a check

51:53Olly Fawcett:for you know 25 quid every year i said i said that is a great business if that marmite ad goes

51:59Simon Woodroffe:out around the world you're going to get rich she said yeah so i suppose the seed was sown there and it's worked very very well for me and it worked well for me because of course as soon as you start to make some real money and you get those exits which is what we all want really and you don't pay very much tax on it most most governments so far have given entrepreneurs breaks to encourage them to do that yeah um then you know suddenly you get some money in your bank and you you know i'm not one who goes out and spends it on ferraris i did buy a ferrari once actually but but i don't that's not my thing yeah i'm thinking what can i use to do something do the next project and of course they don't always go as well as the first two do i've had two big hits with the osushi in the hotel yeah i've done quite a few things that haven't gone wrong and if i hadn't had that royalty i think my money would have been chipped away quite a bit

52:50Olly Fawcett:because that's topped it up every year you speak a little bit about wealth in in the book what i think there's a there's a small story at the very start about going to an atm and seeing two million quid in the bank yeah that's fine what did it actually feel like to finally have the security

53:05Simon Woodroffe:of a level of wealth for you i mean to me two million quid when that happens fairly early on was a really great deal of money you know i'd always been oh i've got nearly 200 grand tied up my flat i'm doing well can make it 250 you know and then um you know so it was a great feeling of relief and i tell the story in the book that um will you read it but i'll tell you it it yeah I'm standing at the ATM machine, it's on the screen, and I'm there for so long looking at it, the queue forms behind me, and they're also coughing and spluttering. And I turned to the bloke behind me, I said, cop a look at this, mate.

53:46Simon Woodroffe:And I can tell you, I can tell you all, if anybody tells you that money doesn't make you happy at that moment, I definitely was happy. But it was more relief, really. But then, you know, it's a good question, actually, at any point in your life, is what is your relationship like with money yeah because i think a lot of people are scared of life anyway you know scary world to live in and money is part of that and danny kruger who's the guy behind farage and reform yeah you know i'm agnostic on all of that but um he he's got a prison charity called only connect that i've been part of for years right and his new um advertising, marketing, you'll preach, is for prisoners leaving prison and how they survive and how they don't go back.

54:40Simon Woodroffe:And he calls it love and money. And apart from health, which is what we all need, but love and money are the two things in life that are the most important. Love in its widest form, friendship and everything. And money is an incredibly important part of our life and our security and a lot of people are in denial about that and they have a good relationship and i think making money and creating wealth and making money for yourself and for other people and all of that is a fantastic thing to do and i think money is a very very good thing in the world i don't think it's just about greed do you think obviously you you built business in in london in the 90s going into the noughties i think for me even being in my professional career

55:22Olly Fawcett:for 13, 14 years, I've seen the perspective on wealth creation and money and business change a lot over that time.

55:31Simon Woodroffe:Have you?

55:31Olly Fawcett:Yeah, I think so, a little bit. I think that currently at the moment, I think there is very different perspectives on wealth. I think there's one perspective which is wealth is bad, personally. I'm seeing a lot of that. And I'm also seeing a very negative look that wealth is everything, right? There's nothing in the middle, which I think is where we should be. Where we want to be. And I guess the question for you is that as individuals, how can we better train ourselves to understand our wealth but also other people's wealth?

56:02Simon Woodroffe:Well, there's two parts to it for me. But the first one, which you didn't really ask me, is that I actually don't think it's fair. Fair, equitable, or even desirable that we have a world in which there is such enormous disparity of wealth. yeah so i think that that will in time be will naturally happen um and a lot of people would disagree with me and say i know the rich people govern the world and all of that but yeah i always say and i don't think it's entirely true but i always say that william wilberforce didn't abolish slavery because he thought it was bad and he managed to persuade everybody he abolished it because he didn't want the slaves to start a revolution and start slapping everybody around right um yeah so that is my sort of metaphor for it but i think the solution is education and at the moment we need to take this country for instance um you know we've got a four-year plan for education the government is trying to dictate what gets taught in classrooms how teachers teach it and what we should be doing is letting teachers teach their local communities what they think they want to and so let go and and and do it and also there should be a 30 40 50 year plan for education in fact there should be a 50 100 year plan for the country not a four-year plan yeah that raised the difference and and you know the education is changing and you know i've seen some amazing stuff happen in america actually with ai there's there's schools in america called alpha who claim they put all their kids in the top one percent and they do two hours educational ai self self learning with kids you know it's certainly with 14 15 16 17 year old kids um self learning and then the rest of the time is spelled spent on character development and if you can really spend that because reading writing arithmetic we absolutely have to teach all the rest is going to be instantly available i'm flicking my fingers here you know so um if you can teach people to be better human beings to talk about to be you know to to build a culture that we're talking about yeah about you know having good relationships with money being able to deal with the fear of life being able to deal with jealousy being able to deal with relationships how to be generous the fact that we you know i mean i i i talked about this in a speech the other day and this guy who's a doctor came up to me, he said, you are spot on.

58:29Simon Woodroffe:Because I was talking about we all have a dark side and we all have a light side. And in the light side, the dark side is, I'm selfish. I have all those things. But I try now to become the person that I want to be and to behave in a better way. And so then the light side shines. And I think that could be taught in schools. So I think longer, I'm a long-termist. I don't really want to talk about politics, not this political show, but what's happening today and who's going to be the next prime minister. This doesn't interest me at all. What I'm really interested in is what we do in the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

59:09Olly Fawcett:Speaking of education, there's a very popular question floating around at the moment, which is a classic question, but it's been floating around in various online places. Do you think anyone can learn or can naturally be an entrepreneur or a business owner? Do you think anyone can do it?

59:25Simon Woodroffe:i think that you can have um a culture where and i think it's already happened i think even that show i was on dragon's den and and the apprentice and all of that stuff yeah you know before that kids were growing up and what you're going to want to be want to be a pop star or a film star or i want to be a firefighter or whatever it is and those are aspirations that kids learn And then the entrepreneur thing came along in the 70s, post.com, and I was part of that movement. And suddenly, entrepreneurs are getting on television like celebrity chefs had been prior and had become the fashionable people.

1:00:04Simon Woodroffe:So in that respect, I absolutely think you can educate people to be entrepreneurs because you can get them to aspire to do it. um i think if you actually start educating people about um you know how to raise money through crowdfunding or how to do spreadsheets or how to do this stuff and the other if you're not careful it can knock the entrepreneur out of the person um but i think but to read about people like me and indeed about you and people who are out there doing things and making it aspirational and then kids want to go kids are very clever they want to go out and find out about this stuff yeah and you know the idea i mean you you had an incredible situation that to actually start a business when you were 17 and make some money and actually see money coming in and now we see occasionally these very young kids dealing in whether it's gold or ebay or whatever it is yeah making real money i mean that is to me that's people say oh she should give kids their their youth but that's more fun than being youthful isn't it yeah i mean thank you but i think i think

1:01:16Olly Fawcett:for me i just didn't i had a lot of time and i was naturally passionate about it i'm actually interested by it and i think i was quite the lucky part of me was that my brain told myself that i didn't like education and i think but i didn't i think a lot of my friends unfortunately went through education i was a few years after the fees had gone up massively so you know obviously saw the student riots and etc etc um but you know it was then very expensive it wasn't nine grand for the whole thing it was 27 grand for the whole thing so that that for me would just like straight away i was like i don't want to go down that route that decision that naturally happened for me was probably everything if i was on the fence i think it would be a very different story um and i also feel for me university would have been wasted time and and i think that that was it and i think a lot of people go because and it's changed a lot now and it's different but a lot of people go because they're trying to find themselves in these aspects but i was just like i just want to get on with

1:02:09Simon Woodroffe:something i want to do something and breed it that's what i say to kids is um you know unless if you're going to be an airline pilot or a or a brain surgeon please please go yeah probably

1:02:20Olly Fawcett:don't learn on youtube do not learn on youtube do you know what i mean although no no no no i'm

1:02:28Simon Woodroffe:fine with fixing a bike but not fixing my brain otherwise um you know if you want to get yourself into debt for 50 grand three years hence go off and go to university yeah um apprenticeships are pretty good you know you can earn along the way um but to get out and over deliver to anybody to get out and do especially if you're really lost you know yeah i i sell my boat through tahiti and i met some people down there and they said go and talk to one of our kids because he's just he sits at home smoking dope all day and he's doing nothing and i said just do something he said i just don't know what to do i said he said i'm really really lost i said there's rubbish out there on the street go and take a plastic bag and pick the rubbish up for a week and see if you get any reaction at the end of a week people started asking what you're doing he said i'm cleaning up the neighborhood and this one guy is at a bicycle repair shop was so impressed with him he said um i'm going to give you a job and he went and now he's a bicycle mechanic and but the point was that he'd gone out and done something himself yeah but and i say go out and and do anything and don't think about what you're getting out of it think about over delivering think about in my 60s vernacular blowing the the employer's mind yeah i want to see the jaw drop you know yeah this we've got this kid and he's amazing yeah and it's hard i mean i came from a very

1:03:49Olly Fawcett:privileged upbringing so you know for me i didn't have to worry about half the things that some people do so i had a leg up from day one you know and that's that's that is the luck part of it for me um considering how the odds of being alive are way higher than even you know being alive um so that comes into it but you were mentioning before obviously you won dragon's den for the first season and you've done some other bits and you've you've invested in brands and i know that's changed for you a little bit now what's the one quality in founders that you think is the most important

1:04:18Simon Woodroffe:you know i've met people who are totally uncreative right and just dry cramptons who've got small boring businesses who've been successful i've met people who are nice they prove they're really nasty yeah um so there is no actual formula um my for personally my formula i think the things that i've had has been enthusiasm um i love a new idea i can get it going i like to do things very very quickly and it's so enthusiasm and i and you know i don't know how you feel about this but i left school young enough so that the imagination wasn't educated out of me so it was almost like you know ideas are still floating around there and i love the sort of excitement of that and also um i almost as if i didn't i didn't have that careers officer sort of going if you don't get your a-levels you don't get to university it's all going to go wrong so i never had that indoctrinated into me so i sort of thought it was all easy and somehow i don't know how this happened but i never really watched telly and so yeah i never really did social media when came along i never watched telly as a kid that much um i was always out going kayaking or climbing or climbing trees or something and i think that as a result i wasn't sort of indoctrinated by society you know i'm the worst person that somebody was still go did you see that movie you know that movie and where he says that i go i don't actually you must know yeah yeah

1:05:50Olly Fawcett:so where do you think a lot of your imagination comes from because for me and while you're while you're pondering on that a lot of my like i'm a big fan of watching random youtube videos on random subjects i'm a big fan of i love social media it's how i have my business today it's an area working but everyone's you know there's this conversation around kids and i know the band just come in for under 16s it's all around what you consume and there's a lot of bad stuff on those channels but for me i get inspired by the creativity i see and the ideas i see in the business content and you know i when i was younger i used to re-watch dragon den all the time you know i remember i remember bbc coming out with their channel and the reruns i've watched all of them i've seen you many a time and that's my inspiration that's my imagination and that's where i've learned from i've never learned from you know i haven't read your book i've listened to your book i i learned by kind of it all coming in yeah for you someone who's maybe not watching the tv but is it experience and being out in the real world that is your your imagination driver where does it come from yeah um i don't know i mean i i've

1:06:52Simon Woodroffe:I just soak it all in. And I get, actually, I think probably one of the places that I was lucky that really, really drove it was that when I first started working in the theatre and with rock shows, I got obsessed with shows. And when I got to be able to sit with an artist and sketch up what their show could look like, And it didn't miss me that I didn't miss it that bands is a very similar word to brand. And I'd be telling people that their album cover should look like their live show and they should be saying the same words lots of times, you know, the same things on stages and in interviews.

1:07:39Simon Woodroffe:So I started talking about that and got their interest. But then to actually be able to sit and think about what something could be and fantasize about it and do it, then my imagination really got free and I was able to do things like that and then build them and then get given big money to go and build these things and tour them around the world and have amazing reviews. And that was pretty exciting. So I think a lot came later on like that. Also, my dad used to take us on sailing holidays. i used to draw the boats that's what another place i think early on i used to draw the boat so i was

1:08:16Olly Fawcett:really into drawing this era and all that stuff building that forward in the book you speak about the future i think one of the last chapters speaks about a little prediction of of where things are going yeah but what's the future for you and what do you spend your most of your time doing now i know obviously the book has been a big piece but where are you spending most of your time now

1:08:34Simon Woodroffe:considering the journey you've been on well um you know yo i still own the brand you know carved out for hospitality and hotels and i'm still looking at other things we've got yo home on the burner and yo yo yo zone i'm always looking for people if there's anybody out there wants to do things i'm always looking for the right people to do things with the yo brand um oh so really yeah i think so you know i i hope it could go out go out further i think you know i'm not going to be in the forefront of it yeah these days but you know i've got the seed money to make things to get things started and um you know i'm i'm i'm pretty good to mentor to people as well you know so you know there's there's all those possibilities but you know actually on the one hat i've always had it but on one shoulder i'm extremely serious about everything i do i just want it to be the best best best and on the other shoulder i really don't give a damn it's just an adventure this old life and and uh we just see what happens and uh yeah so i've written that book i might write another book actually one of the things I want to do is I want to I want to take this book around the world and I want to go to China and India and UAE and North America and and and find the entrepreneurial groups like exist in this country people like your audience today that exist all over the world and come back with that information and make some little one-hour documentaries for YouTube about the people I've met and the government ministers and how you can get visas for that country and how you can do business in those things and what the contacts are so maybe that's my mission is to put all these disparate entrepreneurs together around the world

1:10:14Olly Fawcett:and um maybe out of that can come some kind of a revolution who knows soon to come i would imagine some people are funny when you say that they're successful and i'm hopefully you you would happy be happy for me to say that you've been incredibly successful is success everything you thought it

1:10:32Simon Woodroffe:would be well it is in the sense that uh the money has been great i think it's improved my character not lady because i i know that it could have gone wrong for me i don't think you maybe have ever survived that but it's definitely i definitely think it could have gone wrong certainly when i was older um and um so having money has taken away the worry about having to worry about every penny and where it all comes from yeah and it's given me some money to actually develop new projects so i think it's been very very good for me um um and then the success of becoming the person you want to be which is still a work in progress i still have my moments i can be difficult and and i don't want to be i don't want to ever be difficult but i want to do it in a better way always really

1:11:25Olly Fawcett:constantly drive well look my last question to you is is what does it take so what does it take to build a brand like yo sushi and more yo how what has it taken from you and what you had to give it

1:11:37Simon Woodroffe:ideas we've had them since eve first met adam but take it from me execution is the key this is actually felix dennis who was a publisher and i love it and uh he says um he said good fortune the truth is the harder you work the mortgage you sweat the luckier you get the money go find a likely investor to get what you need you toadies to greed as you listen to this the talent go find it but first wine and dine it it's tedious work with a talented jerk to win it you've got to be in it but never be late to quit and cut bait expansion is vanity profit is sanity overhead begs and it walks on two legs the first step just do it and bluff your way through it remember to

1:12:27Olly Fawcett:duck godspeed and good luck amazing there's lots of sayings that are heard very a lot from that that whole speech brilliant so i mean thank you for coming on the show and congratulations on the book i know you've got more coming i'm sure there is another another something down down the end of the pipeline at some point i can tell already um but thank you for coming on and telling your story and the advice is extraordinary. And I know you've got lots going on and heading back home very soon, but thank you for giving us some time and coming on the show. It's been a pleasure.

1:12:57Simon Woodroffe:Thanks, Lully. See you soon.