A guy named Mark Norton designed what is now the ‘Yo!’ logo but he’d set it against a photograph - a neon lit Japanese scene lit in Tokyo – it just looked fantastic. We showed people and they were saying, ‘This is great, we get it’ until we showed some Japanese people who sat there with their jaws wide open – it turned out that the picture was of the red light district in Tokyo but of course we couldn’t read the neon.

In the beginning were you purely self-funded or did you have backing?
People always say, ‘I’ve got my business plan and I’m going to put all my backing in place and when that’s there, that’s when I’ll set up the business.’ Sorry to tell you but it doesn’t work like that. A business like life, like love affairs, is not as neat and tidy as that, it’s very messy. So was I fully funded? No I put in every last penny and it was all done on a wing and a prayer and I actually opened the first restaurant without all the money being in place and within a week we had a queue around the block and the money started rolling in.

What was the biggest challenge that you faced?
The first main challenge was to find a site. I didn’t want to open a two-bit restaurant, but landlords aren’t going to do that unless you have a covenance and a track record. I had no track record.
The second challenge was that I didn’t have enough money to do it. Those two things are pretty big problems, but I never gave up. But the truth was I didn’t have a choice. It’s much easier when you don’t have a choice.

In 2003 you sold the majority stake of your OCC management team. Why did you decide to do that?
Because I couldn’t pull it off in 2001 and 2002. I’m good at creative ideas, about talking about them, getting people enthused about them and imagining how it will happen – I’m an entrepreneur in that sense – I’m not a great operator. One of the great ways to be successful in this world is to figure out what you’re good at and spend 95 per cent of your time doing what you’re good at. It’s exactly the right thing for me and it suits me very well, rather than trying to do every little thing myself, that’s how I want to take the ‘Yo!’ brand forward.

‘Yo!’ is now a mega brand. Did you ever envisage that it would extend so far?
The truth is I opened my first restaurant to get myself out of a hole. Then Harvey Nick’s saw they were quite hip called me up and opened one there, then Selfridges. Soon after we started I realised that Yo was a very good name there’s our delivery service Yo To Go, we did a few bars called Yo Below, our clothing range Yo Japan, our hotels Yotel. People say we’re going to be a brand like Virgin – my intention is to do that of course but one little bit at a time.

How important is innovation in business?
I think you can have a corner shop, innovate nothing at all and make a big success out of it or you can have the most innovative idea in the world and make a failure of it. I personally like innovation, I want to be innovative on a big scale, I like things to be radical because that’s the only way I feel safe. Gone are the days in my book, when you can say, ‘We’ll roll that out for the next ten years’. For us, every Yo! Sushi that we opened, we’ve done something different. It’s about progress not perfection. I always say, ‘Let’s try new stuff, it doesn’t have to be perfect all the time.’  

How important is a programme like Dragon’s Den in helping others set up their own business?
It’s inspiring. We hate and love the Apprentice, we hate and love Dragon’s Den – there are now kids in the school playground growing up saying I want to be an entrepreneur. It has exposed that business is common sense for the most part and I think you are going to see a lot more people leaving school thinking, ‘I could go out and do something.’

Do you think Dragon’s Den is a true reflection of the potential in the UK?
No. Dragon’s Den is a TV show darling, made for TV. They don’t go out and recruit the best possible businesses in the UK, the subjects were found by the BBC researchers – what do they know about business!

What would you say to those people who are keen to set up a business but see the market as dried up and that all the businesses have been done?
The world changes constantly so there are always new opportunities. When I was a kid, all the mountains had been climbed yet when I grew up there were all these different ways to climb a mountain, upside down and it’s the same with business – there are always new opportunities.

In a society where a lot of focus is placed on qualifications, do you think there’s enough support for people wanting to start up their own business?
I think we’ve moved into a new age, suddenly the whole culture has changed. Britain is the most deregulated country in Europe. In France you need qualifications to be a hairdresser, you need qualifications for everything. Here you have a bit more freedom. The right time is now.

How do you make an idea happen?
What most people do is sit around thinking, shall I? Shan’t I? And the answer is don’t decide but start in this moment now.  I have a three second rule where I don’t let myself think for more than three seconds whether it will work or not. Instead you put in a bit of money and start doing a bit of research.

Are you born an entrepreneur or do you think you can learn the skills?
Philp Larkin, the poet said, ‘They f*** you up your mum and dad, they may not mean to but they do. They give you all the faults they had and add a few new ones just for you.’ According to psychologists, 80 per cent of you character is formed by the time you’re eight years old, the next ten per cent is formed by the time you’re eighteen, so you’ve only got ten per cent of your character to form during the rest of your life. So you’re pretty much destined by what happened to you as a kid.

You’ve reached a great stage what’s the most enjoyable thing about reaching this level of success?
There’s the freedom to do things and there’s the ability to influence things. There’s all the Yo! things, television, there’s the guru stuff, writing and then there’s helping other people. I love having ideas and the very early stages of starting them. I love performing at whatever level, whether it’s giving speeches or being on TV and I like doing things for other people it’s not just for myself, it’s deeply satisfying. 

Are you confident that you’re well on the way to being up there with the best of them?
I remember making the first few million quid I ever made and within a few months I was meeting these people and instead of having a few million quid, they had twenties, fifties, hundreds of millions and I felt inadequate and I remember thinking, ‘That is a form of insanity’. I’m more than satisfied with what I’ve got, all the rest is cream.

What’s your work ethic?
Over the years I’ve learnt what’s important and how to be pretty efficient with my time. I’m quite good at the basic things of life like I never lose a phone number I always write things down, keep notes, I think and prioritise stuff, don’t deal with things twice, try to make decisions quickly, even if decisions aren’t right, knowing which things to think about over night and which ones not to make too big a deal of, knowing when to move on, let other people do things their way and not my way so that they have the enthusiasm It’s quite well ordered my life.

What drives you?  
It’s the idea in business that really drives me. The obsession with the idea of wanting to see what it will actually look like much more so than the desire for great wealth and pleasure. What also drives me is the fear of it all going wrong and falling apart.

What advice would you give budding entrepreneurs out there?
You ask me Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday to Friday and I’ll give you a different answer every day. But I will say I’ve never met anybody who’s followed their dream and regretted it whether they succeeded or failed. Many, many people who’ve looked back on their life has said I wished I’d grasped that opportunity and taken a few more risks in my life and gone out to fulfil my dreams because you only live once.
 
You got an OBE in 2006 for your contribution to hospitality, did you ever think that you’d get to that point in your career?

Getting an OBE was interesting. I won a lot of awards along the way and I’m very proud, it’s a shame my mum didn’t live to see it she would have really loved it. I got a letter in the post, and Stelios told me he had the same thing, the letter from a really old fashioned department in St James.