To achieve great things in business, it helps if you have a passion for your industry and a love of your particular product. So, investors who’ve bought into fast-growing restaurant group Clapham House will no-doubt be cheered by the news that chairman David Page is not only a self-confessed foodie – ‘my weight has increased from 14 stone to 18 over a 20-year period!’ he exclaims – but he also eats regularly at the restaurants he operates, though he admits he’s now sticking to salads.

For starters – popular brands
Page formed Clapham on a summer’s day in 2003 and floated it on AIM in November that year, raising £22 million.

Since then he’s pursued an aggressive strategy of restaurant openings that’s seen turnover rise a staggering 132 per cent in one year, hitting £17.3 million for 2006. The scale the business has achieved in this short space of time has enabled it to turn 2005’s losses of £605,000 into pre-tax profits of £684,000.

Clapham’s model hinges around snapping up what Page calls ‘best of class’ branded restaurant formats, namely The Real Greek, Gourmet Burger Kitchen and The Bombay Bicycle Club. In May this year, the group raised a further £25.4 million to buy the Tootsies chain from AIM peer Urban Dining.

‘We’re specifically targeting brands that are already popular, and are happy to pay over the odds for the right business. That said, we had Tootsies in mind as an acquisition target for a while. Urban Dining bought it for £30 million, spent £7 million on it and then we acquired it for £25 million – that was a good deal.’

The 200-outlet main course
Clapham has earmarked more than 100 potential locations for Gourmet Burger outlets, including at least 60 in London, and similar lists are being drawn up for its other brands. To fund expansion, terms on a new £19 million bank debt facility have been agreed.

Page says, ‘We told investors we were going to build the business up to at least 200 outlets as a public company and then we’ll see what happens, so that’s our focus at the moment.’

He likes to stay pretty hands-on when it comes to new openings, playing a pivotal role in picking suitable sites and getting stuck in with restaurant design. Unusually, his creative bent stems from training as a cartographer, which means, ‘a lot of the time I’m more skilled than the architects involved.’

Topping it all off
Page has plotted a circuitous career route. After cartography he trained as a teacher aged 21, and on the side worked at Pizza Express, which only had six restaurants back then. In the end, the buzz of a busy restaurant was, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘more appealing than a class full of primary school kids’. Teaching wouldn’t have been the best vehicle for his ambitious nature, he believes, ‘though perhaps I’d have sorted out the entire British education system by now.’

In a Cinderella tale of working from the bottom up, he started as a dishwasher at Pizza Express, was promoted to cook, waiter, manager, owner of the largest franchise and eventually chairman of the company – all within 20 years. He tempers this achievement by pointing out, ‘It was bloody hard work!’ During his rein, the group expanded from 50 to 350 stores in eight years.

‘The period I most enjoyed at Pizza Express was up to the stage of having 200 outlets. After that it became very corporate and most of my time was spent in meetings. It’s much more fun – and you can make more money – in the early growth stages of restaurant development than when running large organisations.’

Which probably explains why under Page’s direction, The Clapham House Group has become such a tasty investment opportunity.