John Vincent - Building A Restaurant Empire
Guests: John Vincent
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
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The thing I think about most, especially when I'm on the go but also when I'm sat here in the Diary of a CEO studio, is the Wi-Fi and internet that we have to work with. In fact, anytime I'm filming away from the studio, one of the first things I do when I arrive is open up an app and do a speed test to see how strong the signal is.
The number of screenshots I've sent to my team about Wi-Fi signals at different locations is actually pretty crazy. It matters that much to me because it's such a competitive advantage to have fast Wi-Fi. On any given day, if I'm recording hours and hours of footage with a podcast guest, I then often have to have my team send that across to our London team who then do the edit.
So, fast Wi-Fi and internet is not a "nice to have," it is absolutely business mission-critical. So, when it came to finding the best provider who could supply internet and Wi-Fi to our new LA studio, which I'm sat in right now, we looked at every single option.
Of all the providers, the one that came back with the steadiest connection, as well as being the cheapest, was today's sponsor, Spectrum Business. Spectrum Business keeps businesses of all sizes connected with fast, reliable internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, and mobile services.
Millions of business owners already rely on Spectrum to keep their operations connected. So, if you want to join them, head to spectrum.com/business to learn more. That’s spectrum.com/business. Restrictions apply; service not available in all areas.
John Vincent, co-founder and CEO of the European restaurant chain Leon. Fifty-three restaurants and counting. This podcast is deep; it's introspective, personal, and at times it gave me goosebumps.
John created Leon in his father's image. John named Leon after his father. And the week before I sat down with him to do this podcast, his father tragically died. When you dedicate your life to creating something for someone and then they die, how do you feel?
How does he deal with the inevitability of bad news every second of every day that running fifty-three restaurants brings him? How did he build Leon? What was the sacrifice? What is his truth? What does he need to tell you?
This conversation with John has terrified my ego. It changed my perspective and it reminded me of what actually matters. You have to listen. Without further ado, this is chapter fourteen and I'm Steven Bartlett. This is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
John, thank you so much for joining me. It's a great honor to meet you. I'm a big Leon fan. Leon is my way of staying in shape and being good to my body. I'm living a very busy life and it was very interesting to read about the inspiration for Leon. I read that it came from you being left with very little choice as to what food you ate when you were having business meetings. Is that correct?
Henry Dimbleby and I were working basically as business consultants for a company called Bain & Company. We were advising a lot of boards on their strategy, and we worked 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week. The choice was cold sandwiches, fast food, late-night pizzas, or late-night takeaway. We were getting fatter and fatter and more and more ill.
So we thought there’s got to be a better way of feeding people. I used to love McDonald's as a kid. I remember being so excited that my mom booked me a birthday party there. I remember being on the floor in the hall kicking my arms and legs in the air with joy that I was actually going to go to McDonald's. And then I realized this stuff ain't good for me.
So I thought, why can't we reinvent this stuff so it's just as tasty, but it ain't killing us? And that was the idea.
Well, thank you for creating it because you've certainly helped me keep in shape somewhat while I've been running my business. Leon now has almost, is it 52 restaurants?
Fifty-two, including three in Holland.
Fifty-two. Getting to that point—I grew up working in my mom's restaurant. I was seven years old and I remember scrubbing the floors and using a knife to take the old paint off the restaurant walls and then painting the walls through my summer. What I experienced from running my mom's restaurant was incredible pressure and stress.
You've got thousands, hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of customers. Some of them aren't very nice, complaining, and there's immense heat in the kitchen as well. I hated being in my mom's restaurant. You have 53 of them. What's the hardest part about having 53 restaurants?
I'm on a WhatsApp group called "Risks to Trading" and the other one is "Emergency Comms." On things like "Risks to Trading," I bet you when I turn my phone over, there will be a pump that's broken somewhere or a coffee machine which is "86," which means it's broken. The intense practical operational stress, as you say, that you experienced—that is just replicated now 52 times.
I do sometimes look at people who maybe run hedge funds or people that run internet businesses and I do think, wow, what must it be like to not have those physical challenges that you experienced in your mom's restaurant? It is an incredibly difficult industry.
Ultimately, our job is to work with people who are necessarily on living wage, often young people, and it is an incredibly tough job to keep all of those people motivated when shit happens. Because I promise you that with 52 restaurants, there is something going wrong at any point.
And that could be a small thing or it could be a big thing. So, I think one has to be Zen about it at some point. If you become affected emotionally by everything that goes wrong and every mishap or every setback, then you could make yourself very ill running 52 restaurants.
A lot of people will make themselves ill over very minor things. Their boyfriend has uploaded a photo on social media, a girlfriend has liked someone's photo—this kind of sort of menial thing. It makes you think that unhappiness or at least dissatisfaction is subjective. How have you learned or become able to deal with so much bullshit, so much unpredictable bullshit, at scale?
I think the first thing to say is that it is never possible for me to suggest that I am some kind of guru or Jesus who does it continually. The first thing to say is that anybody who attempts to disassociate themselves from that stress will find themselves failing at some point.
I'll give you an example of that. My dad died last week, last Wednesday. I was continuing, as you would expect, to be affected by that. My wife, Katie Derham, was talking to me about something to do with the arrangements and also telling me that her brother was coming a bit later that night with the family.
I remember looking down and someone had given one of our wraps a three out of ten. In that moment, with all the pressures that were going on with my dad, I got pissed off about it. I ended up, in that moment, actually having a row with my wife about it.
Why was I rowing with my wife or taking it out on Katie because she was accusing me of not listening to the fact that her brother was going to be a bit late? I shouted at her. And I hate that. I actually hate the fact that social media pervades people's lives so much that I cannot escape it.
As long as I've got an internet connection, I'm going to be bombarded with shit reviews, I'm going to be bombarded with customer complaints. I think to some degree we need to recognize the fact that we are, with technology, building ourselves a bit of a horrible world where one finds it difficult to escape from that.
Having said that, I'm finding a lot of insight in the work that I'm doing with the Leon Wellbeing Director called Julian Hitch around understanding some of the Daoist, which is traditional Chinese philosophy, and some of the Zen philosophy that informs a martial art that I've been learning for the last three years called Wing Chun.
A lot of the lessons in there around Daoism and Zen are about disassociating yourself emotionally from the crap. I think I have learned from it, and if there's anything that I can suggest to any of the people listening to this, it's really to learn to "die every day."
There's a verse in the Dao De Jing which says "die every day," which means recognize the fact that we are all as low as water. The wave is not really separate from the ocean, if that makes sense. The wave looks like a separate thing, but within the next three seconds, it's going to submerge back into the water.
I think we need to recognize the fact that we are all like waves. We are all nothing. We are all as level as the sea. I think that there's a certain mental ill-health that has been developed in the West by thinking that we are something other than that. By thinking that we're somehow special or the fact that we need to be different and special and disconnected from other people. I find most comfort in realizing how insignificant and reassuringly insignificant I am. That helps me.
We live in a world where, as you said, everything is designed to make us feel significant. The fundamental design of social media is to reinforce us in some way—that what we said was smart or funny or worth sharing. What, in your perspective, are the dangers of our kids and your kids growing up in this social media world?
Well, I think it's like the old phrase: if you put a lobster or a frog into boiling water, it'll jump out. But if you slowly boil it, then it doesn't realize it's being boiled. I think our kids are being slowly boiled and they don't realize it.
I went to a conference the other day where they were talking about how babies are going to be chipped and that mothers and fathers will be allowed to have lower taxes and lower insurance if they allow their babies to be tracked from a health perspective.
Of course, it will reduce the NHS bill, and of course, it will reduce the policing bill if we know where everyone is. I think we all have to recognize the fact that we will be sold, in very what seem to be very rational terms, very economically viable terms, the idea to track our own health, to accept being monitored in terms of our whereabouts and our physical health.
I think we need to recognize that that's shit and that's not good. I think the dangers are that, on the one hand, we will lose our freedoms that I think are very dear at a practical and an emotional and spiritual level for people.
The other is that we will start to believe our own storytelling and ego. When you talk about how we are constantly told to create our own online brands, to curate our own online brands—I know perhaps when one of my daughters takes a photograph to go on Instagram, maybe it takes an hour. She chooses one photograph out of a thousand.
That doesn't happen often, but I've seen it happen. Therefore, people think that what they see online is somehow real and true, and we pretend that social media is a window into truth. Unfortunately, it is a window into artifice.
The more artifice and lack of truth that we pervade and popularize, the more mental health disorders will be created. I think it's based on the other idea that people talk about "I" and we talk about "ego" and the people that we are, but I think we need to recognize that "we" don't exist.
By which I mean the "Steven Bartlett" or the "John Vincent"—they're both just constructs. Barack Obama is just a construct. Barack Obama is a set of stories that have been told, a set of media imagery, media storytelling.
As we think about our own individual identity, it's worth remembering the "we" that we think exists is based on a whole bunch of myths that we've told ourselves. First of all, we're in the cot and someone says, "Steven!" and then you keep hearing this name "Steven."
You’re like, "Fucking hell, this is getting ridiculous, they keep mentioning this word 'Steven.' What is 'Steven'?" And then eventually you realize, "Shit, they think that I'm separate from them. That's weird." Of course I'm not separate from them, but hey, I'd better start believing it.
Then you go to school and they call out your name in class and they say "Steven" and you put your hand up. That reinforces this idea that you're separate. Then they say, "Steven, you've won the history prize," and you go, "Hey, Steven's good at history." Whether it's true, half-true, or not true, you create a sense of who you are. It's mostly not true. The "Steven" we have in our mind or the "John Vincent" we have in our mind—it's a set of myths, a set of stories that we tell ourselves and we attach identity and constancy to it.
What's the danger of us doing that?
The danger is that we start to become very unwell and we stop being happy now. So, if I think about the major lessons, they are: do not seek happiness from a future occurrence. Do not defer happiness to this magical island that once we arrive at, we will be happy. And do not associate your happiness with money, fame, or recognition from third parties.
Because as soon as we put ourselves into a situation where we are deferring happiness into the future, we are clearly off-balance in the present moment. If I look at the tribespeople that I meet in Africa or the ones that my friends have met in Brazil, they are rooted in the present moment. They are absolutely conscious and present *now*.
The problem with living your life abstracted online or abstracted in the future means that you are off-balance and you are not getting fulfillment from the now. The martial art that I do, Wing Chun, is predicated on fulfillment coming from the practice, not from the result of the practice. Not from "one day I will win this fight," not from "one day I will have this glory."
I hear what everybody is asking themselves, which is: how do you be present? I read your Twitter bio and it says that you're taking a break from Twitter to be more present. So I was going to ask you about that. How do I be more present in a very busy digital world where notifications are bombarding me and everything is about the future, making plans, schedules, and things like this?
So we're talking very practically, aren't we? Is that what you mean? Okay, so I think there's a practical element and then there's a sort of mental element. The mental element is to start by not valuing anything.
By which I mean recognize the fact that ultimately, the very act of breathing, the very act of trusting our subconscious processes to drive our immune system or the process of making sure that we're breathing—only value that.
So that will immediately put you into a situation where all you're valuing is the things that are literally within your own body. As soon as you value a prize that you might get or what a girlfriend might think of you, you are putting yourself in a much worse position from the point of view of your own mental health.
Almost act as if you're dead. I think some people might think this is a bit strange, so I think people are going to have to bear with me here. But if you say, "I am dead. I've died," it allows you to suddenly revalue the things you really then want to value.
If you start with the starting point that says "nothing is of value, I am dead," you then start adding back the things into your life that are only the absolute critical things.
And what are those things to you?
On the practical side, I would say breathing is the most wonderful way of becoming present and physical-based meditation. Some people might have downloaded the Headspace app or some people might have found that those sorts of things in terms of meditation help.
I would say from the point of view of what we've learned in Wing Chun, the physical movement—even literally walking and breathing and allowing your body and your mind to synchronize and breathe as you do it—something literally as simple as going for a walk and consciously breathing as you do it and walking away from your phone, walking away from any devices.
Be in touch with nature. It could be a tree in a park in Manchester, it could be a small bush that you find on the estate where you live. But literally find something—it could be a small frog, it could be a spider, it could be a tree—but just observe that. That’s a very practical thing that people can do.
How do you pair running a business, which is making a lot of money and being an entrepreneur and pursuing scale, with the pursuit of valuing nothing and not putting importance on things like money?
A couple of weeks ago, one of the podcast listeners asked me a question. He works in a company at the moment and he's been on a journey of figuring out what's important: meditation. He's almost arrived at the point where he believes that what he's doing every day is to generate money and success, which he doesn't think is important anymore. But he's now caught in that process. He wanted to speak to me about what's important and he almost feels like he's driving towards something that he knows won't make him happy.
What's really interesting is that the purpose of Leon is not deferred happiness. Let's take an example. Fuji had an objective to kill Kodak. That was their mission. A: that was future-based. B: as soon as you've killed Kodak, what do you do then? You have no mission.
And so, the purpose of Leon is to eat and live well, starting with ourselves *now*. So the very purpose of Leon, the very mission of Leon, is not deferred to the future. It's something that we can start now positively in the present moment.
Everybody at Leon is not thinking our job is to increase the share price to X or the market capitalization of the company to a billion. That is not what Leon people think. There's a book called the Bhagavad Gita, which is a Hindu script which has been talked about in a book called *The Great Work of Your Life* by Stephen Cope.
I’d really recommend people to read this. What it says is that fundamentally, happiness and fulfillment come from mastery and being in the present moment. Now, the money that Leon requires is the byproduct of the mastery and it is not the objective.
Henry Dimbleby and I won an award called the Sustainable Business Award. Sajid Javid stood up and said, "The purpose of capitalism is to make money, but oh shit, we better make it sustainable." I realized as I was going up to accept the award that it's like looking down the wrong end of the telescope.
If we were a Brazilian tribe, we wouldn't wake up in the morning and think, "I know, let's make money, and then once we've made money and we've killed the ants and the monkeys and we've poisoned the rivers and we've chopped down the trees, let's give back. Let's go to a charity auction and buy some Wayne Rooney signed shirt and give back. That’ll make us feel good and we’ll stick that up in our garage in our mansion," right?
We wouldn't think like that as a Brazilian tribe. What we would say was, let us protect—the purpose of our activities must be to protect the soil, to protect our lives, to protect the tribe, to protect the ecosystem. But we need to do it in a way which is economically sustainable.
That is how we need to think about capitalism. We need to look down the other end of the telescope. So your friend who wrote to you, making money is the prerequisite for sustaining the good. We need to start thinking about it the other way around.
What is the purpose of the company? Is the purpose of the company noble? Does it make us support life on this planet and does it support fulfillment and happiness? And can we now make that financially sustainable as a second question? That's how we have to look at it.
When I was 18 years old, I thought that life was all about me buying a Lamborghini. I remember writing in my diary, "Before 25, I want to be a millionaire. I want a Range Rover to be my first car." Other things which were equally as empty.
Then upon getting to the age of 25 and multiple people have tried to buy my business—there's been a number of offers along the way—I found myself, when I first got the first offer, finally thought, "You know what? There's a chance that I could make a tremendous amount of money."
I Googled cars and then I Googled big houses. But 25-year-old Steven realized in that moment that cars or houses wouldn't add to my happiness at all. Actually, my fear was that if I bought a nice car or a nice house, I'd actually be more unhappy because that would send me off on a path of not knowing what was important. What advice would you give to 25-year-old Steven about what he should be focused on that isn't financial?
I think it's liking yourself. A lot of people that I know that are billionaires, they kind of hate themselves. They're on their mega-yachts and they've got someone to walk their dog and they've got a personal trainer who they see religiously.
I think that unfortunately, there are a lot of billionaires that separate themselves—either they separate themselves from their true friends, the friends that haven't kept up with them financially, and they end up in this rather sick kind of world of billionaires with the same values.
I would say being able to sleep at night and looking at yourself in the mirror. We have a phrase in Wing Chun called *ju ging*, which is "face yourself." I think the ability to face yourself with real comfort—that absolutely does not come from money.
Of course, if people are listening and they say, "Fuck you, I haven't got any money and it's fucking difficult," yes, it's absolutely difficult when you haven't got any. But there's a threshold beyond which money does not buy you happiness.
Money can take away some of the struggles that provide stresses to many people, but it's not a linear relationship after that point. The more money you have, sometimes there's a negative impact on your happiness. You start something in the Kabbalah tradition called "Bread of Shame," which is basically about if you've got money that you haven't necessarily earned or it's come as a windfall to you because your business has been overvalued or whatever, you don't feel good about it.
Bread of Shame people tend to spend on cars or whatever, because actually, they don't feel spiritually good about the money they've made. I would say that unfortunately, society has manipulated our fight-or-flight responses, manipulated our fear response.
When I was at P&G (Procter & Gamble), which is a consumer products business, step one of the advert was "Create the Fear." Isn't it embarrassing when you've got dandruff on your shoulders? Isn't it embarrassing when people can see a sweat patch underneath your arm? Isn't it terrible when people come around and see you've got a dirty kitchen?
That is all step one—create the fear. I think what your listeners need to understand, especially if they're young, is that adverts are trying to make them fearful. That's the purpose of the first bit of an advert. And then people will pile in with the solution: "Don't worry, you can have this anti-dandruff shampoo," or "Don't worry, it's got these amazing little micro-pigules called some made-up scientific name that means it's going to work."
Constantly, we are being bombarded with advertising that is manipulating us. I think we have to separate ourselves entirely from those sorts of images, impressions, and not let our ego be manipulated by those messages.
You touched on a second ago about hate. That three out of ten you got for the wrap from that person who reviewed online. Obviously not true—your wraps are amazing—but that's beside the point. How do you deal with hate, not just online, but much closer to home?
From friends, family? I imagine when you said to people around you that you were going to start this restaurant, there was a lot of funny looks or people that were giving you false good wishes. How have you learned to deal with hate? Does it go away at a certain level? Clearly, you've not quite managed to master it yet if what a total stranger said about your food caused you to have an argument with your wife.
One hundred percent. I have to come back to the phrase of "Judging people's actions by their insecurities, not your insecurities." I think it was one that I was told about 15 years ago and it just really rang true to me around how often our response to hate is anger. Then that really is our own fear which has caused that anger.
In a moment where someone might say, "Hey, I've rated your wrap a three out of ten and oh, by the way, I bet McDonald's could have done a better job." If I'm knackered, hungry maybe, there's so much other personal shit going on, and if I think things are unfair—I know that that triggers me.
There's something called the Enneagram, which is a wonderful personality profiling tool which I'd recommend anyone listening to go ahead and look at. I'm a Number Eight, which is the "Protector" or "Challenger." The Number Eight doesn't like things that are unfair.
Eighty percent of the time, Number Eight is Nelson Mandela, and if triggered, they can be Saddam Hussein. So there's an element in my personality—because of my makeup, my childhood, my development or lack of development—I know that I can get angry if I think there's a lack of love or a lack of fairness.
And where does that come from?
My dad just died. I think my dad was a man of immensely high integrity. At the same time, he loved his life—he loved poker and horse racing and snooker and sailing. I loved him and I loved the things that he stood for.
He was quite a gentle man and quite a shy man. Often I used to look back at him being sometimes overshadowed by people with larger personalities. I used to think that was unfair. I used to think that certainly at work maybe he was dominated by third parties or people with bigger egos than him.
There’s an element of me wanting to become this Number Eight Protector or Challenger almost to make sure that that doesn't happen to me, or almost trying to protect my dad. I think Leon—you've spoken in the past about potentially entrepreneurship not just being something to admire but something to pity, or something which is maybe an illness.
I think that we all do things to maybe counter things or impressions and stories we've been inadvertently told as children. I once sat down with an acupuncturist on a massage bed and she said, "Wow, everything you do is driven by your dad." I was like, "Oh, don't give me that kind of cliché bullshit." And I thought, "Oh my God, the whole business is named after my dad."
The whole business is an attempt to say, "Hey dad, we can do this. Our family can do this. We can have a business, we can grow something big, we don't have to be fucked over." I think that probably some of the stories that I told myself as a kid, whether they were true or not, definitely wanted me to be the "Big Avenger."
They wanted me to create something powerful and worthwhile, but something in tune with his values of integrity and fun. I want people to look at Leon and go, "Shit, they're the real deal. They've got integrity, but they're a fucking laugh." I love the food, they're fun, and they're creating a world that's actually worth living in.
Even in the last week since my dad died, I've been thinking more and more: "Shit, I really did build Leon to be him." To mirror his values and yet to create something that he was proud of. It's only weird that until someone dies, you realize the energetic imprint that they've had on you.
And talking about death itself, what's your view of death?
I think it's something which we are conditioned to be very afraid of in the West. As something we don't talk about, it's like pooing. I would say I am sort of midway between the two. I definitely think that I suffer from the same psychosis or fear of death that most people have in the West.
But when I travel to Africa, I feel reassuringly insignificant. When I'm out and you cannot see any buildings and you can just see for as far as the horizon, 360 around you, and you can see the lions, you can see the animals and the insects—you see that insect dying there and that insect being born over there.
I do find it reassuring how small and irrelevant we are. I think that the more we attach ourselves to our self-worth, the more we fear death because the more we tell ourselves that we are somehow separate from universal consciousness or somehow separate from each other, or separate from—sounds New Age—but separate from the universe.
The more we recognize the fact that the apple is really not separate from the tree or separate from the leaf or separate from the root or separate from the soil. Adam and Eve started fucking up when they started naming things as separate. So the tree was separate from the apple, and in reality, it is not. It's just part of one thing. The wave is not separate from the ocean. For me, conceptually and physically when I'm sailing or I'm out in a great expanse, I find death much less frightening and much less of a thing to be scared of.
I wrote in my diary this week, "What you're scared of will define you. And we're all scared of something. Most people are just scared of the wrong things." When you hear that, what are you scared of and how do you think what you're scared of has driven your life?
I think that's really hit the nail on the head there. I said my superpower would be the ability to flick a switch and to get businesspeople, politicians, individuals, whoever, to switch from acting from fear and ego to switch to acting from love.
And that is the thing that I am most scared of. I am most scared of big companies and big governments, and we see it happening in quite a few governments in the world, crushing love and crushing freedom and crushing spirituality and humanity. I see organizations making the wrong decision because the organization is fearful or because they're not valuing the individual or not valuing love.
It sounds like a very macro thing to be afraid of, but it is the thing that angers me. And of course, if it's angering me, it's because it's coming from fear or scaredness that I have. And that is the thing that frustrates me most about the world. When newspapers write things that are not true and hurt people emotionally or they—without any remorse.
So I think it's people acting without love and people acting from fear or greed or ego that scares me most. Because it scares me on a human level and it scares me on a kind of socio-political level because I don't know how we're going to get out of some of the shit that we are in if institutions like that don't act from love.
On a more granular level, what keeps you up at night?
I think that sometimes I suffer from stress that affects me at a physical level and sometimes I literally don't feel very well at night. I feel at my best when I am not in the UK, when I'm on a small island in Greece or I'm in Africa or I'm in Brazil—those are the times that I sleep best at night.
I think that I suffer—and this is why the Kung Fu martial art is doing so much for me—is I literally physically sometimes feel so exhausted that I can't sleep. For me, I don't have worries that go around in my head at three o'clock in the morning. I find that I'm having a physical response to the thousands of small things that have accumulated through the day. How about you? What keeps you up at night?
I guess it really depends on the week. A lot of the stuff that keeps me up at night is fear of not reaching my potential. I think there is so much that I could be doing and there is so much that I need to do that I don't want to sleep because I could use that hour to fix one of those problems or to achieve one of those things.
I'm generally not a worrier. I don't tend to worry about things too much. I think that drives from a lack of fear of losing it all. I came from a place where I had absolutely nothing and I was fine and happy then, so I feel okay with going back to that place.
I'm not okay with other people losing their jobs, but I'm okay with losing my own. And then I worry about really petulant things that I imagine all CEOs worry about—you know, how someone in the office feels or someone hands in their notice at work that might get to me one day or having to dismiss someone might literally keep me up and thinking.
Oh, that's true, I've had that. If I have to get rid of someone who I know is not performing but I really like them, that has kept me up at night.
In the last year, that's the one thing that affected me the most—was someone that had been with me for a long time, having to go and see them and to let them know that they wouldn't be in the team anymore was the one thing I can say has given me the most, I'd almost say anxiety. To the point where I found myself laying in this little bathtub thing I have on the terrace at nighttime, telling myself to focus on the leaves. Because I just needed to center myself and be more present because I was thinking too much about the future.
And did you, having done that, do you find it easier next time?
It doesn't seem to get that much easier. I mean, I've done it multiple times and it doesn't seem to get that much easier. From the first time to now, it's definitely easier, but it's still incredibly hard. So that's one of the things that I just hate; it's the worst part of my job.
And just very quickly, I know you spoke about your potential. Do you think it's possible to achieve your potential?
No. And one of the things that I've posted up on my Instagram—I've learned that I have to be at total peace with the fact that I will never get there. In fact, "there" is the journey, and therefore I am already there. I'm trying to live it.
I already have everything that I want and need. And being completely honest, I've always known that I was there. When I was 18 and I was shoplifting pizzas to feed myself in Moss Side, living in this shit-hole with no electricity, I was really happy.
How did you shoplift the pizza? That's clever.
You walk in, you go up to the person behind the till, you ask them something so then they don't think you're scuttling around trying to steal pizzas, then you go get the pizza. I just had not eaten for days on end so I would go into takeaways and hope that someone had left some scraps there and take those.
But the point was, I knew I was as happy then as I am now. That's one of the things that I'm most grateful for because I didn't pin my happiness on attaining something. But I was told by Instagram and these new influencers that I would become happier when I got money and stuff.
People have to understand that there are so many unhappy people who have—I spoke to someone the other day, she said, "I have killed myself online, I am so happy." She said, "The stress of having to be this person, the stress of having to post these glamorous shots that were all fake. I hated it in the end. But I'm so much happier now I'm hopefully going to be nobody again."
That's what people need to understand. I think anyone who has achieved lasting fulfillment has achieved it by just saying, "This is who I am, I'm really cool with it. And I'm not trying to be these other seven things that I could be." Because we're so imaginative, we imagine the banker, the John that is running Greenpeace, the John that is playing at Glastonbury next week.
All of those are valid parallel universes. We could possibly do any of those, but we can only do one of them. Finding peace in that and finding simplicity and replacing "Fear Of Missing Out" with "Love Of Missing Out," I think is definitely the way forward.
Entrepreneurship has been glamorized. Do you think entrepreneurship is for everybody?
The short answer is no. Entrepreneurship—if it's defined as imaginatively creating new opportunities and innovating, I think anyone can do that without having to be John Vincent. You can do that by being a PA, by being a salesperson working in a factory—putting your hand up and saying, "Hey, I've worked out a much better way of making this widget."
That's entrepreneurship. Society should offer everybody the opportunity to be entrepreneurial in that way. The ability to contribute, the ability to be creative, the ability to be listened to. But that doesn't mean to say that everyone has to be the person that starts a company.
The life that I lead is purely the product of my history, what I love, what I'm scared of. I think it's really dangerous to have role models sometimes. It's really dangerous to think, "I'd like to be like Richard Branson."
My generation and younger generations, because we live in this social media echo chamber, are confusing admiration with aspiration. So they look at Mark Zuckerberg and think, "I want to be Mark Zuckerberg." But you're not Mark Zuckerberg. Your brain is not Mark Zuckerberg’s. You weren't brought up in the same way that caused Mark Zuckerberg to have the internal desires.
Also, would you want to be Mark Zuckerberg right now, being called in front of Congress and Parliament to explain why you didn't admit that 50 million users had been nicked? Trust me, be careful what you wish for. The phrase is "Be a good version of yourself, not a second-rate version of someone else."
What's the cost of being John Vincent, CEO of Leon?
I think I'm going to die a little bit earlier than I think I would have done. I think the stress that it puts on me is probably meaning that my cells are reproducing not as perfectly as they should be. I think my gut health isn't as good because I'm stressed, I'm killing all the good bacteria.
Sometimes I find it very difficult to feel good. I sometimes find it difficult to not think of myself as a failure. That doesn't happen often, but you have to check yourself. There are times when I think, "Shit, I'm such a failure. I've only got 52 restaurants," or "I still haven't achieved X or Y." I sometimes have to tune way back into the lessons of Zen philosophy in order to stop myself not feeling down about what I haven't achieved.
Katie Derham, she's your wife. Married for 15 years. This is my last question, but married for 15 years, doing what you do and all the stresses and all the bullshit—does she understand? What’s the impact that running this business has had on the relationship? And speaking more selfishly, as a single guy that's failed in relationships, I think, because I run a business, what advice would you give to me?
Katie is the most amazing person. She is a broadcaster, journalist, businessperson in her own right. She's got her own production company, she presents the Proms, she used to be an ITV newsreader. She totally gets it and she totally understands.
I'm sure there are times when she thinks, "Oh John, please just relax and stop. Stop going over the same stuff in your mind about should I do this, should I do that." I definitely allow my business life to pollute my home life. I would like to be more disciplined about that. So I've tried locking my phone in a little red metal box on a Friday night.
My brain is always thinking, and it's often thinking about work. I would love for that not to be the case. I would say for you, you will find a woman who fits, who's got her own confidence, interests, and strength of character so that you are a partnership of equals.
They will love the bits of—they’ll recognize they can't love you in slices. So Katie says, "Look, I know I can't love you in slices. I know that living with you is fun, living with you is high intensity, living with you is rewarding, and I'm going to put up with the stuff that pisses me off." It comes back to a lack of perfectionism. Some people have like a list of 10 things that they want a partner to have, and I think most people do well if you get five and a half.
Thank you so much for your time today. I know you're an incredibly busy man with your 53 restaurants and I've taken more of your time than I should have, but it's been a really interesting conversation. How have you found it?
Amazing. I think you're a really nice guy. I think it's fascinating the journey that you're on, and it mirrors so much of the journey that I'm on. I'd like to reciprocate and interview you at some point because you sound like an amazing person.
Thank you so much, and I will leave all of the links and stuff of where to find you if anyone wants to reach out. Thank you so much for listening to this chapter; it means the world to me.
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