Simon Woodruff came up with the concept for Yo! Sushi after 30 years of working in the entertainment business. Having left school at 16, he designed and staged international concerts for stars including Rod Stewart and George Michael before moving into TV. He applied his experience and rock concert principles to the conveyor belt restaurant, wanting it to be a complete entertainment experience. The first restaurant opened on London’s Poland Street in 1997 and its call buttons, robot drinks trolleys and Japanese TV became an overnight success.

He is now developing new YO! brands including YOTEL, which was inspired by Japanese capsule hotels and have opened at Gatwick and Heathrow airports. He is also working on YO! Zone, part spa, part cafe, part bar and part nightclub; and YO! How, an online support community for budding entrepreneurs
In 1999 Simon won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and became part of the CBI/BCC Ambassador of Entrepreneurism campaign, with which he is still actively involved. In 2001 he was awarded the accolade of Best Venue at the Retailer of the Year Awards and in recognition for his contribution to hospitality, Simon was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 2006.
He has also appeared on the BBC 2 hit programme Dragons' Den as one of the formidable panelists, who make and break the dreams of would-be entrepreneurs as they pitch their business ideas for financing.

You’re one of Britain’s top entrepreneurs. Where did the original idea for YO! Sushi come from?
I was sitting in a restaurant with a guy I knew from the TV business by the name of Mr Uruhara. I was aged 42, down in the dumps thinking what could I do, while eating sushi. And I thought, ‘What about sushi? I love sushi and it’s always so expensive in London,’ and he said, ‘What you should do Simon is a conveyor belt sushi bar with girls in black PVC mini skirts.’ In that moment I remember thinking to myself it was a eureka moment. I had never even heard of conveyor belt sushi bars, it was like having a school boy brain, it was like having the electric train set going round the living room delivering the marmalade in the morning.

You left school at 16, how has that affected your career progression?
After a few Halcyon years, doing everything that we did in those days, I do remember thinking that my father was right and that money did oil the wheels of life, with no education to fall back on you think, ‘What do you do?’ So I lived on my wits. I got a job as a roadie, then I became a stage designer and various things but I was always looking for how to earn a living as I was unemployable effectively. So how did it affect me having no qualifications? – absolutely enormously, it tainted the entire pattern of my life.

You’ve had a real varied past.
I worked as a bus conductor, I worked in a factory, then I got a job in the theatre, then I was a roadie – I toured with a lot of the rock bands of the seventies. I went from being the lighting roadie to the stage designer. The whole era grew up and I grew up with it and in 1985 I did Live Aid, I remember looking around and thinking, ‘I’ve got to get out of this before I get found out’, as I’d had no training.

Would you say your varied path along with working with the likes of people, such as The Rolling Stones has given you a good grounding for running a successful business of your own?
I think what gave me the grounding was learning from the bottom up. In the design business I learnt how to get things built, I learnt how to design and sell to people, I learnt how to use my personality and character to get people enthused to do things and make things happen. In the television business I learnt much more about international work and contracts – I’m learning all the time.

So why did you decide to take the plunge in your early forties - was it because the idea just came along?
I got divorced in my early forties and I was thrown to the ground, my business had gone wrong and my self-esteem was low. When I was a kid I said I would be a millionaire by the time I was twenty, got to twenty and thought I’d put it off till I was thirty, when I got to my thirties it was a decade when all the drama happened in my life, so when I got to forty it was a kind of ‘tear your hair out’ moment, I remembered that I completely forgot to be a millionaire and I had a sense that I was running out of time.

Did you think about the risk factor or did you just think it was a good idea, and went for it? Did you do a lot of market research?
If I had gone out and you had been my target market and sat you in a room and said, ‘Would you like to eat raw fish off a conveyor belt with robots serving the drinks?’ I don’t think you would have put up your hand and said, ‘That’s for me’. My point is you can’t do market research on a market that doesn’t exist and it would probably have taken a large part of my small budget to do that. When I start something I want to do something that I want to do. When I’m in my sixties I want to blow people’s mind, something that’s so outrageous – outrageous is the new passion and vision – that people will say, ‘I’ve got to try that.’

As you said, it’s a very trendy place, where did the Yo! come from?
I had lots of names that I would have given to my restaurant that would have earned me a living and gotten me out of the hole. I had Sushi Circle and Sushi Circus and in the middle of this long list was ‘Yo!’. There’d been a girl called Alika years ago when I worked in the TV business. She used to go to raves and would come in the morning and I’d say ‘How are you Alika?’ and she’d say, ‘Yo!’. So I thought Yo! Sushi! I showed people and they thought ‘What a stupid name’. Of course The Beatles is a terrible name but it’s what you do with it.