IF you are suffering from a hangover, I can recommend no finer companion than Simon Woodroffe.
“What can I buy you?” he says sympathetically, standing at the Groucho Club bar. A double expresso with triple grappa, please. “Fantastic,” he says, trying it too. “I am going to have this more often.”
A minute later the former Dragons’ Den star is perched on the edge of his armchair, eyes bright with enthusiasm, chatting away nineteen to the dozen in his trademark, rockbiz drawl.
I should be more careful. For Woodroffe — a man who talks pretty much non-stop — expresso and grappa is clearly the equivalent of rocket fuel.
And what is he wearing? Red silk shirt, baggy green suit, bright red shoes, not to mention those jaw-bone-length sideburns beneath thinning brow — he looks like an elder brother of Batman’s Riddler.
But that’s how he likes it. Since he found fame on television and fortune from selling his Yo Sushi restaurant chain, he has thrown himself with gusto into being a celebrity entrepreneur.
Right now, that can stretch from conference speaking and television appearances and living on his glamorous Chelsea houseboat through to performing a one-man stage show (launched in Edinburgh two years ago), and recording songs with Ian Dury’s old backing band, the Blockheads.
More recently, after receiving an OBE, he has appeared in political ads, saying he was “proud to fund the Labour party” (he gave £1,000). He is not a shrinking violet.
But what about business? After he reduced his stake in Yo Sushi, pocketing £10m in 2003, he said he was pushing forward a number of projects, all under his Yo Group brand. Next month he was supposed to open his first two Yotels (“capsule” hotels with bedroom cabins rented by the hour) — that has now been put back to early next year.
Plans for a YoZone spa at Battersea power station may come to fruition in 2009, and his residential property arm after that. There is a suspicion that if 54-year-old Woodroffe doesn’t move quickly, he could become best known as a one-hit wonder.
And does he care? Not a bit, it seems. He is just happy being him, the man who has made a fortune and is now keen to enthuse others. He’d had all the investors behind Yotel over from the Middle East that morning — he is being backed by Kuwait’s IFA Hotels. They take him very seriously. Details are now being nailed down on Yotel room prices and specifications, but there is no rush.
“The great thing about being a private company is that you can do things when they are ready,” he grins. “Probably last time we met five years ago I was talking about Yotels, and we are still on it. My thing has always been to talk about things before they happen — people don’t nick your ideas, it just scares them off.”
Well, maybe. But he is right — last time we met he had been hatching exactly the same schemes. Then, however, he was also a very different animal. Ten restaurants into the Yo Sushi chain, he was a jumpy, anxious, former private-school rocker who had done a bit of everything: roadie, stage designer, ski bum, mountaineer, salesman.
But he had hit it lucky with his idea for a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant designed with Californian style. Yo Sushi grew fast, initially. By 2001, however, growth had stalled and Woodroffe was not enjoying it — he was flying off on tangents, and moody to the point of insecurity. His younger brother Patrick, a lighting designer for the Rolling Stones, told me he just wanted Simon to sell up and “be safe”.
Five years later, cashing out seems to have worked. “Yeah, Patrick was right,” says Woodroffe, when I remind him. “We made a lot of mistakes and if it hadn’t been for Robin Rowland, the guy I brought in to run Yo Sushi, I could have gone bust. He saved my bacon.”
Under Rowland, Yo Sushi has grown to 24 sites in Britain, and five overseas, and doubled its customer base. Woodroffe, who retains a 22% share, has reason to be cheerful.
He takes another slug of coffee with grappa. “God, that’s good. Do you do this with all your interviews?” No, but it’s a thought. He laughs. Woodroffe looks like he is enjoying himself. He works hard at finding points of mutual interest, rarely dodges a question and smothers even blatant boasts in knowing humour. He seems totally relaxed.
That, he says, is because he has found a way of doing business that suits him. He leaves day-to-day planning on his Yo projects to younger partners whom he mentors. He just does ideas and publicity. It works, and others appreciate it.
“Simon is brilliant at filling people with enthusiasm,” says Duncan Bannatyne, fellow panellist from Dragons’ Den. “And he likes being eccentric. I really miss him in Dragons’ Den.”
Woodroffe’s appearance in the television show’s first series brought him to public prominence. Yet by series two, he was gone. Jumped or pushed? Woodroffe bobs his head. “There was to’ing and fro’ing and what happened in the end was I couldn’t do it as I had contracts to appear elsewhere.”
Others suggest he was too nice for the producers’ taste — certainly his predeliction for peace-making between the giant egos either side of him may have hastened his exit. Conflict makes better television. And he was unhappy at how contestants were chosen and treated.
“I told the BBC early on that there should be better due diligence because they were bringing on a lot of crap people, but they did that deliberately because they wanted us to be horrible to them. I think that’s a mistake because to survive long term they must have some decent investments.
“Instead, they wanted it to be like Pop Idol — just trash everybody. I believe we are in a golden age of entrepreneurship, and I think we should be more encouraging.”
And that’s why he spends a lot of his time now giving speeches and lectures. It’s not all appreciated. His “How I Got My Yo” show involved songs, poetry and acting, and was slated by some at the Edinburgh Fringe (“Don't give up the day job” etc), but it was, says Woodroffe with his Labrador-like enthusiasm, fantastic training.
Where does he get that confidence? Not from his upbringing, that’s for sure. Born the eldest son of an army brigadier, he says his family was obsessed with appearances, struggling to seem better off than they were. He was equally committed to showing them up — thrown out of his school, Marlborough, and later, at 17, sent to open prison on a cannabis offence: eight weeks in North Sea Camp. Easier to cope with if you had been to boarding school, of course.
Then it was a struggle to find the right vessels to fill with his enthusiasm, but he never gave up. And success has definitely helped.
“I am easier with myself now,” he says. “I am not so driven by fear any more. I do things because I want to do things. I still get the heebie-jeebies, of course, but that’s because my reputation is on the line.”
Is he more of an entertainer than a businessman now? He pauses. “That’s not such a stupid question,” he says.
Thanks. But I’m not the only one who thinks it. Rowland says Woodroffe is happier “because he can get on with what he’s good at, which is being famous”. And he doesn’t mean that nastily. “I love Simon to death,” says Rowland. “He’s just cut from different cloth.”
But all agree that Woodroffe must get the next project off the ground soon, or he will lose credibility. He has good sites for his first Yotels, at Gatwick and Heathrow airports, and the concept is intriguing — the cabins measure 10 square metres, look onto an internal “street”, are packed with high technology, and can be cleaned and re-let in half an hour. But he has lost impact by delaying their launch.
Anyway, he is more worried that I haven’t seen his houseboat. “We should have met there, you know.” He lives on the 80ft barge, which cost him £250,000 to buy and another £250,000 to refurbish, with his 16-year-old daughter, who has just left school, and thrown herself into “party organising”. That sounds familiar.
Then there’s the neighbours. “Damien Hirst came round the other day. I told him I might do a bit of Britart,” says Woodroffe, nodding sagely. Hirst, apparently, was very encouraging. Oh, please. But Woodroffe is such good company that, really, you could forgive him anything.
Vital statistics
Born: February 14, 1952
Marital status: divorced, with one daughter
School: Marlborough
First job: assistant stage manager, Richmond Theatre
Income: £700,000 from different sources
Home: a houseboat in Chelsea
Car: ‘I ride a Vespa scooter’
Favourite book: Seven Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer
Favourite music: Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones
Favourite film: Spinal Tap
Favourite gadget: nitrogen-filled binoculars
Last holiday: Sweden
Interests: boating, tennis, polo, mountaineering
Simon Woodroffe's working day
THE Yo Sushi founder wakes at 6.30am on his houseboat, Trafalgar, and later rides his Vespa into London’s West End. “I have offices at Yo Sushi and Yo Group and Yotel,” he says. “I am in two or three days a week for a few hours at a time.”
Otherwise he works from the boat, where Cheri, his housekeeper and PA, organises his day. “Or I am doing public speaking.” He charges over £7,000 per booking.
He has also been involved with the Labour party recently. “Not particularly because I am a Labourite but because I think the long term of politics is about management, and UK plc needs to be managed by people with business sense.” He is booked as an after-dinner speaker at the Labour party conference this autumn.
“There’s a call every day offering something interesting.”
Downtime
“SOMEONE told me long ago that the very rich don’t take holidays,” says Simon Woodroffe. “It just all melds into one. And that has always been my aspiration.” So he likes to throw a bit of his current passion, boating, into his everyday life. He is going to a boat show in Helsinki this week to buy a new speedboat so he can zip up and down the Thames to shops, pubs and meetings.
Before boating it was mountaineering and horses. He particularly likes polo. “But farm polo, nothing posh. My dad was a very good polo player.” Woodroffe also plays tennis at the Harbour Club and likes to go on jaunts with his 16-year-old daughter Charlotte.
“We have just done four days in the Swedish archipelago. We go to hotels and I say, I’m her brother, and she says I’m her granddad.”
