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Simon’s BiYO!

Introduction

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Simon Woodroffe OBE, born 14 February 1952, ^ref is a British Entrepreneur and business guru. He is the founder of YO! Sushi, YOTEL and the YO! Company. ^ref

Amongst many TV and press appearances, Simon was an original dragon in Series One of the popular British TV programme, Dragons’ Den. ^ref

First working in theatre, rock shows and television, Simon fell into a depression after his divorce from the mother of his daughter, Charlotte Woodroffe. Feeling “desperation” ^ref he returned to his childhood aim to become a millionaire. He conceived and created YO! Sushi, opening the first restaurant on Poland Street, Soho, in 1997. ^ref The venture succeeded, creating a chain of restaurants and popularising conveyor belt sushi in Britain.

YO! Sushi and YOTEL have become global brands and Simon continues, through the YO! Company, to conceive of new YO! ventures.

In 1999 Simon won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award ^ref, the Catey Group Restaurateur of the Year Award ^ref, and many others for his ventures including Retailer of the Year, Outstanding Retail Experience, and Design and Art Direction awards.

YO! Sushi now has more than 500 locations in UK restaurants and supermarkets ^ref, and “close to 100 restaurants all over the planet.” ^ref In 2023 YO! Sushi was sold to Zensho Holdings for £494 million. ^ref

YOTEL has 24 sites worldwide ^ref and aims to expand to 50 hotels by 2025 ^ref

In recognition of his contribution to hospitality, Simon was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list 2006. ^ref

Woodroffe receives a 1% royalty from turnover at all YO! Sushi restaurants ^ref and a royalty from sales at YOTEL hotels and residences worldwide.

In 2024 his net worth was estimated to be £50 million.

Early Life

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Family

Woodroffe was born in Oxford in 1952. His father was an army officer and reached the rank of brigadier. His brother Patrick was born in 1954. The family lived in a five-bedroom detached farmhouse in Essex. Woodroffe’s father wanted him to join the Army or be a stockbroker – he wanted to be a rock star. ^ref

Woodroffe describes the influence of his family on his lifelong drive to be an entrepreneur, saying “I think my parents felt like poorer relations – the rest of my family lived in vast country houses, whereas we lived in a five-bedroom detached farmhouse in Essex.” ^ref This feeling had a deep impact ^ref on Woodroffe, who explains, “From a very young age I wanted to join the wealthy club. When I was 16, I used to tell everybody I was going to be a millionaire by the time I was 20, but when I reached the 1970s, I was having such a good time I decided to put it off until I was 30. Then when I got to the end of my 30s, I started pulling my hair out because I’d completely forgotten to be a millionaire.” ^ref

School

Woodroffe left Marlborough College towards the end of the 1960s, at the age of 16, ^ref with just two O-levels ^ref and feeling that he had “no real qualifications to fall back on.” ^ref He has described that situation as one that “Focuses your mind. I don’t think we do difficult things with the desire of pleasure; I think we do them when we have no choice.” ^ref

Woodroffe sees his time at Marlborough College as a difficult period of his life but is grateful that it gave him a lifelong interest in adventurous activities like mountaineering and sailing.

Early Career

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Stage design

Leaving Essex, Woodroffe moved to London to take a job as a theatre stagehand. ^ref Later, he saw an opportunity in the stage design business. “I was a roadie for rock bands and I saw there was an opportunity to build sets for them.” ^ref His big break came in designing a stage for Rod Stewart. ^ref

Woodroffe went on to create drawings and models for stages that toured around the world ^ref for many artists including The Moody Blues, Madness, Stevie Wonder and George Michael. ^ref “It was absolutely incredible,” he says. “I was travelling around America with rock bands, staying in big hotels. I couldn’t believe my luck.” ^ref

Simon stayed in the music business until the Live Aid charity concerts of 1985, when his company designed the stage at Wembley Stadium. ^ref He remembers thinking, “I am going to get out of this business before I get found out.” ^ref Falling out with his then business partner provided the impetus Woodroffe needed to move into TV production. ^ref

TV Production

In the 90s Simon went into television, spearheading the development of television deals to show huge international rock concerts worldwide, including the Nelson Mandela and Amnesty International concerts and the Prince’s Trust concerts. ^ref

He worked for a number of years in the TV industry, first selling the rights to televised rock and pop concerts, followed briefly by making programmes about extreme sports. ^ref

YO!

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Opening YO! Sushi

At the age of 40, Simon left the music industry and soon afterwards went through a divorce. This provided him with the drive to start his restaurant chain YO! Sushi, something that he says came out of “desperation.” Simon came up with the idea after a Japanese friend suggested he set up a conveyor belt-style restaurant in the UK. ^ref

“I knew nothing about restaurants. I had had many jobs, from a roadie, bus conductor to TV producer. All sorts. But I had no track record in the restaurant business.” ^ref Regardless, Simon made plans for a conveyor belt sushi bar featuring call buttons, robot drinks trolleys, Japanese TV, self-heating plates and other such novelties.)

After borrowing £150,000 against his house, securing a government grant and persuading some friends to invest in his new project, he had half the money required. So in January 1997, he signed the lease on the first restaurant in Soho’s Poland Street, with only half of the funds secured. ^ref

On the door of the new restaurant, he put up a sign showing some of the restaurant’s sponsors. Simon had asked his largest supplier for extended terms to pay off his debt, and they believed YO! Sushi was a “safe bet” as it had the support of Honda, Sony and All Nippon Airways. However, Simon later revealed those companies had provided very cheap sponsorship. ^ref “Honda had lent me a delivery bike for six months, All Nippon had given me a free upgrade to first class once, and Sony had just given me some free TVs.” ^ref

And so, two years after the idea was born, the first Yo! Sushi restaurant opened in London’s fashionable Soho district in 1997. ^ref

At first, it had no customers. ^ref “The first week nobody turned up, and the second week wasn’t very good either,” recalls Woodroffe. ^ref “And then the second Saturday we had a queue down the block, and then we had a queue for two years after that. It was like having a hit record.” ^ref “Then it all took off, and it was all due to word of mouth. If people hadn’t turned up I would have lost everything. The relief was absolutely amazing, and within a year we had a million quid in the bank.” ^ref

Simon used the new influx of cash to pay off some of those he owed and to launch more restaurants. He attributes the winning formula to word of mouth spreading quickly and the fact that his sushi bars “had a lot of unique and interesting stuff,” from automated call buttons to sushi-making robots. “People had never been into something like it before.” ^ref

YO! Sushi Expansion

Two years after the opening of the first YO! Sushi in Soho, second and third outlets were launched in London department stores Harvey Nichols and Selfridges, which were also tremendously successful. ^ref

But after that, problems began to surface, as the next two branches – one in Edinburgh and one in London’s former County Hall – were flops. ^ref

“We thought that wherever we opened, people would just pile in, and it wasn’t true,” says Woodroffe. ^ref

To stabilise the business, he brought in an outside manager called Robin Roland, to become the chief executive and to orchestrate Yo! Sushi’s successful expansion. ^ref

Woodroffe says: “I was a control freak in those days, [but] I realised that what I needed to do was hand over [control]. ^ref

“Most entrepreneurs don’t let go,” he says, “but I knew it was time to. I felt that although I was once inspiring, I had now become more difficult to work with. My operations manager told me, ‘You’ll never do it, you’ll never let go.’ But I did.” ^ref

YO! Sushi now has more than 500 locations in the UK ^ref, and “close to 100 restaurants all over the planet”

located in the UK, Ireland, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Australia. ^(ref)

In 2003, Woodroffe sold YO! Sushi to a venture capital firm, Primary Capital, for £4.5 million ^ref, keeping 22.5% of the company’s shares. ^ref Woodroffe has gone on to sell his remaining shares, keeping a 1% royalty of gross sales in perpetuity. ^ref

In September 2023, Mayfair Equity Partners reported selling its stake in Snowfox Group to Zensho Holdings for $621 million (£494 million). ^ref

Simon says “One of the secrets of life is knowing what you’re good at. I was good at ideas, motivating people, I was a good mentor and good at starting things. But I was crap at running a business. My strategy is to start with 100% of a business, and gradually dilute my share down, using the YO! name.” And he says that he now views YO! Sushi in the same way that Jerry Hall once said she looked at Mick Jagger. As she said, “I just stand on the side of the stage and say, that’s my man.” ^ref

YOTEL

In 2008, Woodroffe launched the YOTEL brand of airport and city hotels.

After the success of YO! Sushi and a venture into bars with YO! Below, Woodroffe’s expansion plans extended beyond catering. The YO! Japan clothing line was up and running. Also in the offing was a nightclub health spa called Body YO! “Basically,” he explained at the time, “I’ve shot my big mouth off about how my vision is to build a lifestyle brand called YO! that one day will rival Virgin. Now we’re actually starting to do it.” ^ref

The team enlisted the help of aircraft cabin designers Priestman Goode to design and build a prototype room known as a ‘cabin’.^ref The original prototype cabin was displayed at an exhibition called 100% Design in London. ^ref

The rooms were unusual in Britain, and the press reported them as having “the feel of space-age pods: 7ft by 8ft and 7ft high, with an en-suite bathroom of 6ft by 3ft. It’s luxury liner meets The Fifth Element.” ^ref

The Yotel concept occurred to Woodroffe during a first-class flight. ^ref “To address the … lack of budget accommodation in London” ^ref, Woodroffe planned to combine elements of Japanese ‘capsule’ hotels with the service level of a first-class airline seat. With this formula, he and business partner Gerard Greene hoped to offer a cheap but stylish option for business travellers.^ref

YOTELS featured a variety of contemporary innovations, such as convertible motorised double beds, free wifi, innovative storage spaces, ‘cabin crew’ ^ref, automated kiosk check in and a ‘Yobot’ robotic baggage carrier.^ref

The hotels have self-check-in kiosks and keyless entry, convertible double beds, adjustable mood lighting and systems. Furthermore, the New York hotel is home to the YOBOT, the world’s first robotic luggage concierge. The hotels in Boston and Singapore have delivery robots which take amenities to the rooms. These robots are programmed to negotiate lifts and corridors and they can interact with people.^ref

In 2018, Yotel also forged a partnership with Plug and Play – a Silicon Valley innovation platform for start-ups, corporations and investors. In 2019 & 2020, Yotel opened its first hotels in London, Edinburgh, Istanbul, San Francisco, Washington DC, Park City with plans to open Porto, Glasgow and Miami in 2021. YOTEL hoped to have 20 operating hotels by the end of 2021 with another 15 under construction. ^ref

In July 2022, Yotel announced plans to open its first hotel in Japan, a 244-room property in one of Tokyo’s main shopping districts, Ginza. In March 2023, Yotel announced it would open its first YotelPAD location outside of the U.S. in London, England. The hotel was due to open sometime in Q4 2023 and will be the company’s seventh overall property in the U.K. and third in London joining locations in London City and London Shoreditch.^ref

In 2019 & 2020, Yotel opened its first hotels in London, Edinburgh, Istanbul, San Francisco and Washington DC.^ref

As of 2024, YOTEL operates 24 sites worldwide ^ref and aims to expand to 50 hotels by 2025 ^ref

Unsuccessful Business Ventures

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Woodroffe has created many business ventures under the YO! banner that have been paused or discontinued, such as YOTOPIA, YO! Below, YO! Japan, YO! Zone, Baby YO! and many more. However, Woodroffe has an optimistic view of failure, saying of his business ventures, “Successful people don’t go around succeeding all day. Successful people fail, they’re willing to step out of the comfort zone and do something and fail.” ^ref

Public figure

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TV

Simon was an original dragon on BBC 2’s worldwide hit programme Dragons’ Den. ^ref

Simon has also been featured on numerous television shows, including Discovery TV’s VIP Weekends with Ian Wright, ITV’s Homes Property and ITV’s The Millionaires’ Club. ^ref

Public Speaking

As a result of his entrepreneurial success, Simon has developed a strong reputation on the worldwide public speaking circuit. It’s reported that Simon “Speaks openly, avoiding business cliché and audiences find his story extremely inspiring and a catalyst for their own endeavours, be they in a large corporate setting or working at a start-up level.” ^ref

In 2004, Simon spoke at the Edinburgh Festival about his business success with a performance titled ‘How I Got My YO!’ ^ref

Writing

Simon’s first book was published by Capstone in 2004, titled ‘The Book of YO!’ ^ref

The book shares the lessons and secrets of his success, candidly sharing his fears and anxieties as well as his passion and vision. ^ref

Simon Woodroffe contributed to George Martin’s (of The Beatles) book, Making Music.

The updated and online Book of YO can be read here for free

Musician

Woodroffe collaborated with the late Ian Dury’s Blockheads ^ref, recording with them under the name ‘Simon and the Blockheads’ and setting his business life to music in an album called ‘How I Got My Yo’. His public speaking would often end with a live rendition of these tracks. ^ref Listen on Apple Music or Spotify.

Social Media

Simon is sharing business insights and stories from his life with aspiring entrepreneurs on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

Awards

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OBE and Entrepreneur of the Year

In 1999 Simon won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. ^ref

In 2001 he was awarded the accolade of Best Venue at the Retailer of the Year Awards. ^ref

In recognition of his contribution to hospitality, Simon was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list 2006. ^ref

Other Awards

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TV Appearances

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Public Speaking Endorsments

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