Simon Woodroffe
Overall ranking: 53
Restaurateur ranking: 17
Snapshot
As the founder of the Yo! Sushi restaurant chain, Simon Woodroffe is the entrepreneur who made Japanese-style conveyor-belt sushi a hit in the UK and successfully exported the healthy and fun fast-food concept abroad. In 2003 he sold the group to a management team backed by Primary Capital, retaining a 22% stake and the role of non-executive chairman. He is currently devising new spin-offs to the Yo! brand, including a Japanese-style capsule hotel and a spa and leisure project.
Career Guide
Woodroffe was born in 1951 and left school in 1967 with just 3 O levels. He spent the 1970s and 1980s as a roadie, lighting technician and stage manager for top rock bands such as Led Zeppelin, the Sweet and Rod Stewart, and was involved in staging the Live Aid charity concert in 1985. By the start of the 1990s, Woodroffe was selling the TV rights to rock shows.
It was in the early 1990s that a Japanese friend suggested he open a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant served by girls in PVC mini skirts. Dropping the last suggestion, Woodroffe opened the first Yo! Sushi in London's Poland Street in 1997. Within seven days, there were queues down the street and the restaurant was turning over £35,000 a week.
The group and the brand expanded rapidly to end 2004 with 21 sites (including four franchised outlets in Greece and Dubai), a home delivery service (Yo! To Go), a conveyor-belt events catering arm (Yo! Events) and a children's menu (Yo! Kids).
Since handing over the day-to-day operation of YO! Sushi to Robin Rowland in 2003, Woodroffe has launched a Japanese-inspired fashion line in concert with Action Apparal (Yo! Japan), a training and development consultancy for entrepreneurs (Yo! How) and unveiled the prototype YOtel.
What we think
Woodroffe came out of nowhere to take the restaurant world by storm in his mid-forties, when he was out of work, newly-divorced and in therapy. Yet he initially viewed Yo! Sushi simply as a way "to create an income to survive".
To date, Yo! Sushi has won more than 40 business and restaurant awards. The group plans to expand to around 30 UK and 30 overseas outlets over the next three years, and talks are currently underway with prospective partners in the USA, Spain and the Gulf states.
Like Virgin's Richard Branson, Woodroffe is busy building up a diverse empire based around the Yo! brand, which he perceives as an international expression that will travel well, and is currently working on YOtel, the Yo! Zone spa and leisure concept and RadiYo.
If YO! Sushi was Woodroffe's first hit record, he is hoping YOtel (to be launched in early 2006) will be his second. Conceived as a radical antidote "to expensive and boring hotels around the globe", YOtel will marry hyper-designed capsule rooms of 10m2 with the high-tech luxury of a first-class airline cabin to provide five-star facilities from just £70 a night. The design will allow the YOtels to exploit city spaces - such as underground - that other hotels can't reach.
Woodroffe has retained strong media links. He published The Book of Yo! in 2000; recorded the How I Got My Yo! single with the late Ian Dury's band, The Blockheads, in 2004; performed a one-man show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in 2004; and is a highly-successful public speaker.
