I didn’t really pick the ideal day to interview Simon Woodroffe, former rock concert set designer, renowned public speaker, CBI Ambassador of Entrepreneurism and creator and (almost) sole proprietor of the rapidly expanding Yo! brand of restaurants and associated ventures.

From the outside, through the acres of plate glass, the new Yo!Sushi restaurant, bar (Yo!Below) and group headquarters (Yo!land) in London’s Farringdon Road looked finished. There was, in truth, still much to do before this latest venture was ready to rock ‘n’ roll. Still, for a concept that was 3½ years in the making, another couple of weeks probably won’t make much difference.

When I first glimpsed the grinning, bejeaned man voted Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year 1999 and UK Group Restaurateur of the Year 2000, he was humping cardboard boxes - one of which was, appropriately, marked “Simon’s trophies”. Striding hither and thither around his new, industrial-chic workspace, barking orders at a bevy of lads in Yo! t-shirts, Simon Woodroffe was clearly a man with more on his mind than a chat with the trade press.

“Sorry about this” he huffed and puffed. My offer to return at a more appropriate time was poo- poo’ed: “…be with you in a minute…setting up the office…not ready yet…water leaking through the floor…builders…come and look…”

Woodroffe marches me at speed through to the basement Yo!Below bar. The concept, which he freely admits was created to capitalise on the current all-embracing bar culture, is a natural extension of the sushi business. Drinkers sit, 6 to a table, on the wooden platform floor or sprawl on the “bed” area. Each table boasts a font-head dispensing beer and warm sake, the cost of which the state-of-the-art EPOS system adds to the bill. Waiting staff can be summoned by use of a red “Help!” button - that is, when they are not entertaining customers with karaoke-style warbling, a popular if potentially ear-shattering innovation.

Next, a hasty glance upstairs at the Yo!Sushi restaurant. A more refined version of the Soho original, staff train enthusiastically in the corner while the trademark conveyer-belts gleam and seem almost anxious to get moving, distributing vast quantities of delicacies in a constant, flowing circle before the eyes of people who didn’t know they wanted to eat it until they saw it.

We finally sit down, amongst the rabble and the rubble, for a chat. I feel I know Woodroffe already, anyway. His PR machine, as well oiled as his robot drinks trolleys, has ensured that I am provided with a corporate vide-Yo!, a media pack and “The Book of Yo!”, a slim volume which is part Woodroffe biography, part business philosophy, selling for £6 to all those who, like me, are inspired and want to get deeper into the entrepreneurial psyche. It would all appear a little pretentious, a little too pat, a little contrived, if the man himself wasn’t so damn clever and genuine. Blessed with youthful good looks that belie his 48 years, Simon Woodroffe is a leisure visionary.

He left school at 16 and, throughout the 70s and 80s, his production companies designed stages and sets for the likes of Rod Stewart, Stevie Wonder and the Live Aid concert. His first sharp career turn came in his mid-30s when he moved into the TV business, packaging and selling rights to televise rock concerts world-wide. “I changed direction because I lost confidence in my abilities - I really thought I was no good at designing any more” he muses, nodding his head at my suggestion that this may have constituted an early mid-life crisis.

After 7 successful years in TV, Woodroffe found that he desperately missed the creative process of having ideas and making them happen. He quit and, with enough cash to last a year, sat down with pad and pen to devise a few original business ideas. “I thought my time was running out” he says; “I was going to be a millionaire at 30, then 35, then 37, then 40…” “Are you a millionaire now?” I snap, in an attempt to throw him off kilter, which fails miserably when he calmly replies “Yes, multi-”

Conveyor-belt sushi bars was at the top of Woodroffe’s list. There were over 2,500 such bars in Japan and, a few expensive ‘phone-calls later, Woodroffe was clutching sheaves of step-by-step, English-language instructions on how to create your own. Yo!Sushi took much longer than planned to get off the ground, which meant some lean times for the embryo restaurateur, who began to look for sponsors. It took a year to get anything at all out of the likes of Sony and Honda, but naming these giant corporations - without their direct consent - on promotional material gave Yo!Sushi the kind of cachet that would be the envy of any start-up.

Woodroffe invested £50,000 of his own money, “everything I had, property, everything.” He borrowed £100,000 from the bank and raised a further £15,000 from his best friend and the same amount from “a man I met on the street in Paris”, the latter pair’s £30,000 investment giving them 10% of the sushi company. He fired ahead with the first restaurant despite being some £200,000 short of the total development cost and a healthy cashflow from day one meant that he never had to go outside for further funding - “and I own 100% of the Yo! brand - I didn’t have to give any of it away!” He scoffs at the suggestion that luck was involved in his success - “as [golfer] Gary Player says, ‘the more I practise, the luckier I get’”.

The Yo! brand, with its garish, easyJet-esque orange logo, is rapidly becoming the hospitality industry’s most recognisable brand. To Woodroffe, brand is king. “If we are at all successful, it’s because ‘Yo’ is a great word that rhymes with everything and works in several different languages. In Japanese, it’s a serious greeting between men, not like the kids use it here. And in Spanish it’s the possessive pronoun ‘I’” he says. “So we called our delivery service ‘Yo!To Go’, I’ve got a site for a ‘Yo!tel’, there’s a Yo!Babygro in the BabyYo! clothing range and I’m looking to launch a Yo!ganic food range - we have the ability to go into any business we like, provided it rhymes with Yo!” Woodroffe says, only half-joking.

“There’s no one really doing this total branding thing, apart from Branson and easyEverything” he goes on. “If we do as well as Virgin, I’ll be happy. Branson is a role-model. He’s got real guts and he’s willing to fail. The only way to succeed is to fail and not to run out of cash in the process! I’ve seen the designs for his new trains and they are fantastic - he’s years ahead of his nearest competitor!”

The natural assumption is that Woodroffe is a marketing genius. “People say I’m good at marketing, but that’s bollocks” he scoffs. “If I’d researched the concept of people sitting on the floor or lying on beds drinking beer from taps or eating sushi off a conveyor belt, it would never have happened! Throw away your research budgets, I say! Spend the money on doing interesting things instead!” So anti marketing buzz-words is Woodroffe that he makes up his own to confuse outsiders in meetings. Yo!land’s conference-room table is at chest-height, to discourage long, sedentary meetings.

Yo! is now a £10 million business with, at its core, eight restaurants - the original in Soho and our interview location in Clerkenwell, and at myhotel in Bedford Square, the O₂ leisure complex in Finchley Road, the Millennium Dome, the absolutely fabulous Harvey Nichols store in Knightsbridge, the gargantuan Bluewater Retail and Leisure Park in Kent and at Selfridges. There are also the two Yo!Below bars, a sushi delivery service and an event catering operation which provides eats for such cool gatherings as Jonathan Ross’s daughter’s birthday party, not to mention the fact that Woodroffe’s products are in an astonishing 220 Sainsburys stores country-wide, which supply alone turns over £5 million a year and marks the first time that the supermarket giant has ever co-branded a product. A new concept is the recently-launched ‘Roll Yo! Own’ concept in Sainsburys stores - do-it-yourself sushi kits.

“Yo!Sushi is high margin and very successful. But what we also have, with Yo!Below, is the next All Bar One. I can see Yo!Belows all over the UK. Where we can, we’ll open Yo!Sushis next to Yo!Belows, to educate people into eating sushi.” The lead time of 3½ years to build the first eight restaurants is now history - six more will be open by May 2001, in London’s County Hall, in Scotland and elsewhere still under wraps. “As we’re in Sainsburys, I already know from the sales figures which towns will be good for a Yo!Sushi operation” Woodroffe confides conspiratorially.

Phase one of Yo!’s overseas expansion ready, with Woodroffe admitting to being close to signing deals in the Middle East, the Far East, Australia and the U.S. Would he dare to try it in Japan? “Absolutely! Everyone says it’ll be a huge success. The existing sushi bars there are very low-class. We’ll take it up-market.” He is now beginning to seek partners to help him grow the business, a route he prefers to the ubiquitous Stock Exchange float. “I’d probably be a good person to run a public company, but I’m not sure I’d want to be” he says; “ I may not like the culture.”

Woodroffe is not phased by the new technology he has adopted - “there’s nothing lower-tech than a conveyor belt”. The sushi rice-forming robots were imported from Japan - one robot can form rice at the same speed as six skilled sushi chefs and cost less than £10,000 each. Woodroffe claims to have lost no more than 12 hours trading from technological breakdown over the years. “Our management and staff know that understanding the equipment is part of their job and they must take ownership of it.” At least Yo!Below staff don’t have to worry about how to rid themselves of over-imbibers - the table beer-pumps can be disabled remotely.

“If people want a quiet life, why on earth go and live in Soho?” Woodroffe says, when asked about his views on licensing deregulation, particularly in Westminster, where he would love a later licence for Yo!Below. “There’s a very small number of residents there. It’s nonsense to say that you can’t ask people to move because they’ve lived in Soho for years - the world is a changing place and everyone has to move with the times. I wish everyone would stop being so politically correct about it - let them move away to somewhere quiet!”

Whilst professing not to be a political animal. Woodroffe has begun to have what he calls “a bit of interaction with government” and would dearly love to front the fight for the late-night London issue. “We should be so proud of Swinging London. We should be ahead of everyone else, open very late, but run everything fantastically well.” He names industry lawyer Jeremy Allen as the ideal organiser of an all-industry lobbying committee and someone he would like to work with.

“People still ask me now if I miss showbusiness. I tell them I’m still in it” he says disarmingly, as we pick our way through the builders to the exit. “I always wanted to be a rock star but I’m not a good enough singer - so this is what I do.” If the hospitality industry isn’t quite yet ready to rock the Woodroffe way, they’d better shape up sharpish. Forget Ali G - Simon is da man, the one dude who clearly knows the coolest way to say “Yo!”.

Ian Freeman is too old for a mid-life crisis, but is considering acquiring a late-life one

favourite things

Food “Sushi!”

Car “Don’t care about cars, but I drive an ‘A’-series Merc and a Smart car

Overseas place America

Hobbies “I’m an adventurer - I climb, ski, ride and sail”

TV show “I haven’t had a TV at home for ten years. I got rid of it when I realised I was staying up late to watch ‘Topless Darts’ on Sky!

Movie “This is Spinal Tap”