Big Shot of the week
LUKE JOHNSON, 56 CHAIRMAN, PATISSERIE VALERIE
For American investors, residents of hurricane-ravaged Florida and Strictly’s girly-haired love rat Seann Walsh, it has not been an easy week.
Nor has it been a barrel of laughs for Luke Johnson.
The serial entrepreneur is executive chairman and majority shareholder of Patisserie Valerie, the fancydrawers cake maker chain whose finance chief has had his collar felt after a £20m black hole was discovered in its accounts.
Until Johnson stepped in yesterday with an emergency rescue package, the firm looked almost certain to collapse [insert wellworn baking metaphor here] swallowing not only a large chunk of his £250m fortune, but also much of his hard-earned reputation as one of Britain’s sharpest investors.
restaurants have provided his biggest windfalls. You have almost certainly eaten in one. Pizza Express, Belgo, Strada have bloomed under his ownership. Simple, unflashy joints – rather like Johnson himself.
He prides himself on not having an MBA, preferring a pragmatic ‘it’s not rocket science’ approach to business which he espouses in books and after- dinner speeches and a weekly newspaper column.
HE travels to work most days to his Mayfair offices from the home he shares with wife Liza in Little Venice by Tube. He speaks in estuary tones and, despite a lifetime in catering, barely touches alcohol. He never wears a tie.
There will doubtless be some revelling in his misfortune. Johnson isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – he was blackballed by members of the Garrick Club – and has a Vesuvius temper. An appearance on BBC2 show Back to the Floor in 2000, where he worked as a waiter in Belgo, ended abruptly when he tore off his mic and told the producer to ‘shove’ his programme. He holds us journalists in about as much esteem as something he might scrape from his shoes.
His father Paul, the brilliant polemicist and former editor of the New Statesman, sent him to a Berkshire grammar school. other than doing an occasional post round, Luke showed little entrepreneurial flair as a youngster and went to oxford to study medicine.
It was an interview he and his friend Hugh osmond did for the student newspaper with Sir richard Branson which inspired him to go into business. He and osmond began running an oxford nightclub and by graduation they owned several businesses.
He took his job first with advertising agency BMP before working on the launch of TV-am, assisting the chief executive, former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken. It was off to the City next, as a media analyst for Kleinwort Benson.
He continued dabbling in pubs and nightclubs. Then in the late 80s, he and osmond bought a listed shell company called Star Computer Group which they used as a vehicle to perform a reverse takeover of Pizza Express in 1992.
WHAT was then a string of just 12 restaurants was rolled out into a national chain of over 250. Its stock market price soared to £700m.
After selling up in 1999, he and osmond started Signature restaurants, which acquired London hotspots The Ivy and Le Caprice plus Belgian chain Belgo. They also started up another pizza parlour, Strada. All sold on for a tidy profit. Johnson’s canny business acumen attracted headhunters seeking a new chairman for Channel 4.
Goatee-bearded media folk in the Groucho Club were furious. What did a pizza salesman know about broadcasting? Not much, but his six-year tenure, barring the ill-handled Big Brother race row, proved largely successful.
He’s had a few failures along the way. Utility Cable and Borders books both went belly up. He was also an investor in the ill-fated weekly, Sunday Business.
But the Pat Val scenario – his 37pc stake was worth £166m until trading was suspended this week – would have been a whopper. In the long term, employees will demand to know how Johnson failed to see this week’s crisis coming.
But for now, they will be grateful to have a chairman who’s prepared to have his cake and eat it too.