Had it not been for Jack Straw’s brother, John Barnes might never have had a business career and Harry Ramsden’s might never have become the biggest name in fish and chips.
John was at Manchester University, harbouring a desire to become a politician. These were the days of sit-ins and demonstrations, and John stood for office as president of the students union in 1969, leading the race until being beaten at the last count by Ed Straw, brother to Jack.
Nursing his pride he went instead to work for Procter and Gamble who make a point of recruiting from the ranks of student politicians.
"It was a shock to the system going from student life to a hard nosed American company who demanded 24 hours a day 7 days a week out of you. You get all the stuffing knocked out of you. I was put out on the road for six months as a salesman in the north east, but it taught me the basics of branding. I was brand assistant on ‘Daz’ as my first job – and it’s still there selling bucket loads in its new pellet format or whatever they’ve come up with.
"P&G believes in brands and backs them with budgets. They have good products; well researched with a differentiated proposition – and then they back their judgement. They don’t expect things to work in 6 or 12 months – they build brands for a lifetime."
His career progressed and after a stint working in the states launching a new soap brand called ‘Coast’, he was headhunted to work for Playtex in Paris where he worked for two years before again being headhunted by Pepsi to be their European marketing manager.
But his rise within Pepsi led to a traumatic event, which prompted him to question his ambitions for corporate success.
"I was promoted to be general manager of Pepsi in Canada. My wife Pat, our son Edward who was two and Susie our new baby were staying on the 21st floor of the Inn on the Park hotel in Toronto. I was off travelling and there was a massive fire in the hotel. I came back the next morning not knowing anything about it. Six people were killed but Pat and the kids got out down a stairwell full of smoke. It was a huge traumatic experience for all of us, something that changes you. It’s indelibly marked on you.
"I had to go and recover our stuff from the room we had been staying in, and there were chalk marks on the stairs where the bodies had been found.
"It was certainly life changing for me. I really started to question my corporate career, which until then was up, up, up, achievement, achievement, achievement.
"The effect on you is quite extraordinary. Pepsi was very good to us, they paid for a holiday, they gave me my old job back in the UK, but something had changed in me. I suddenly thought ‘what am I doing here?’ I had a young family and I’d been dragging them round the world with me. I think that’s where the link between me and self-interested achievement and corporate promotion was broken. It started my love affair with small companies and doing your own thing."
At this stage John took a job as the UK managing director of Kentucky Fried chicken, and it was during this time that he realised that there was no national brand for fish and chips. If it could work with American style chicken why wouldn’t it work with a national favourite?
He’d seen a fish and chip restaurant called Harry Ramsden’s when he was playing football in Leeds as a student, and it had left a lasting impression as a grand restaurant with good food.
Richard Richardson, from KFC’s advertising agency, suggested that John and he should buy Harry Ramsden’s and turn it into a brand. John loved the idea and set about making it happen.
"In my naivety I went off to see the chairman of Associated Fisheries who owned Harry Ramsdens as well as a trawler business and lots of other things. I persuaded him to sell for £3m and with bank and venture capital funding we gave up our jobs to come north and work out of Harry’s old bedroom. People thought we were crazy"
But why pay all this money to buy one fish and chip shop? Why not start from scratch and spend that £3m on an amazing marketing campaign?
"The creation of a brand is so hard – I learned that at Procter and Gamble. If it had been ‘John Barnes fish and chips’ it wouldn’t have worked. It’s as simple as that. Whitbread tried it with Hungry Fisherman. We thought that Harry Ramsden’s was an embryo brand. It had all these wonderful associations and history having been going since 1928. It was a better place to start than it would have been to do it from scratch."
Suddenly John was running his own business.
"It felt amazing. I mean you’ve got cash flow problems, banks and venture capitalists on your back but none of the corporate support systems – you’re on your own. It was worrying as we’d mortgaged our houses and all the things you do to finance a start-up, but I had a tremendous sense of freedom."
What seemed even more audacious than paying over the odds for a Yorkshire fish and chip shop was the announcement, just a year later, that Harry Ramsden’s was to float on the third market (now AIM). The bank that had backed them decided it wanted its money back. The venture capitalists didn’t want to put any more money in, leaving John with a financial nightmare.
"We were really stretched to come up with a solution. It was our broker who gave us the idea of floating it. We went to the underwriters and said we were floating one fish and chip shop and they said we were mad."
But the offer was two and half times oversubscribed thanks to strong support from local people – leading to the company starting it’s plc life with 4,000 Yorkshire shareholders. It also resulted in a lot of positive publicity. John still maintains that the listing was the cheapest advertising campaign he has ever run.
The big break for the company came as the result of a pioneering deal with United Biscuits, in which Harry Ramsden’s Fish and Chips went on sale in supermarkets. UB backed this with a huge advertising campaign and Harry Ramsden’s brand awareness went from being in the teens to being over 70%.
With clever, and cheap, marketing tricks like this John and his team built the company into a hugely successful, rapidly growing chain with the top brand for fish and chips in the UK, but after 12 years he decided to sell.
"What was happening in our sector was that small restaurant companies were increasingly out of favour. We’d been the darlings of the stock market. Our P/E ratio at one time was 45, it was just ridiculous, and then suddenly you’re out of favour for the wrong reasons.
"We realised very quickly that Harry Ramsden’s needed to get into bigger company hands; it needed a firmer base of funding because the stock market was getting rocky.
We exited November 1999, and if you looked at that sector in the following 12 months it was an extraordinary rate of decline."
John stayed at the company for another year to ensure the handover went smoothly then left the office for the last time at the end of 2000.
"I still think you can see the fish and chips coming out of my skin, and I had a suit that you could certainly smell fish and chips on. But the sale was right for the shareholders, right for the staff and right for me. Did I regret it? You bet I did. Did I feel bad about it? I did, and I still miss it, I miss it a lot, but with La Tasca I’ve got the opportunity to do it again."
La Tasca is John’s next venture, a national chain of branded tapas bars. Once again he didn’t try to start from scratch, opting to buy an established small chain.
"We closed the deal at 2am on the 11th September. The VC’s said afterwards that we wouldn’t have got the deal away if the events in America had happened the day before."
He’s taking the role of Chairman this time, employing management to run the business, and this allows him the time to take on other directorships including Caffe Nero, Yates’s, Zoo Digital Group, Galaxy Radio and Arena Leisure.
He’s also writing a book called ‘Marketing Judo’ in which he hopes to give small business owners an insight in how to leverage relationships with large companies in order to do their marketing on a shoestring – something that was a cornerstone of his success at Harry Ramsden’s.
So what else has he learnt in his business career?
"Nothing is impossible. There is always an answer, but people give up too soon. You have to expect the turbulence. Don’t expect good weather, it’s going to be bad weather. Always have another plan at your fingertips. But having come through all that I’m just incredibly positive about what you can do. You should never give up."
One thing’s for sure though, success hasn’t gone to his head. Rather than base himself in the trendy parts of Leeds city centre, he runs his businesses from Horsforth. His wife Pat runs a suitably well-branded alternative therapy centre there, and he has a modest office in one corner of the building.
When I phoned up the centre’s switchboard a few weeks after the interview, he answered the phone straight away. The receptionist was on a day off so he’d offered to fill in.
This willingness to get stuck in, deal with the customers and understand every part of the business has made him very popular with his employees over the years.
One member of staff looking back at John’s twelve years at Harry Ramsden’s after the sale had been announced said: "You’ve done everything you said you’d do."
Now that’s an epitaph that most businesspeople dream of.
