Paul Campbell: From Trader to Burger Seller

Competition among restaurants is decisively tight, and few owners profit from it by much. Yet Paul Campbell easily makes some good sterling out of it, and is confident he will continue to do so. But of course, he came from the school of hard knocks.

Paul’s family once owned three hardware stores, yet can hardly survive on them living in Essex and London. It was always a daily struggle so Paul lent a hand whenever he could and as long as he could, closing the tills and putting up the shutters at the end of a working day. For his wages all he got was ‘some pocket money and plenty of love’, overwhelmingly the latter. So to help some more he started with a friend his own store in Ilford, selling stuff he got from his father on credit.

At the time the mind-challenging Rubik’s Cube was the most saleable, so Paul and partner decided to sell them exclusively. But another store nearby began to sell them, too, so that Paul thought they may not survive such close competition. They decided to undercut the competitor and thus eliminate it. “We sold the cubes at 10p, which our rivals must have thought was insane,” Paul recalled.
But the idea succeeded and soon there was no competition. That was the first basic lesson Paul learned in business strategies: correct pricing.

Paul then studied history in Manchester, afterwards worked as an accountant with KPMG, and still later managed a chain of health places. He left with not much to show, and remembering his father’s hardscrabble years, he vowed such will not happen to him. In 2000 Paul became a director of PizzaExpress, complementing the capability of his partner who was the operator. But two years afterward they sold PizzaExpress and established the Clapham House (CPH), a Greek food company, the Bombay Bicycle club, and a little later (2004) Gourmet Burger $Kitchen, their most successful acquisition.

“Burger is a wide-favorite food,” he explains is the reason for his success. The gourmet Burger Ktichen has now a branch in Turkey and another in Dubai, with Hong Kong as the next expansion target. At an average take of GBP10-15 from every diner, --- “not so much in prices that you have to push people in”--- Paul believes that Clapham House, which grossed more than GBP45M in 2007, will definitely weather out the slump in consumer spending that is everywhere nowadays.