Julian Metcalfe, OBE, is the founder and group CEO of itsu – the UK’s leading Asian-inspired food brand. Prior to founding itsu in 1997, Julian had already made a name for himself having founded the UK’s best-known sandwich shop, Pret a Manger, in 1986. Julian, a leading figure in the UK’s food and drink industry, is determined that healthier food is a right for the many, not a privilege for the few.
itsu restaurants offer fresh & nutritious hot & cold noodles, rice, sushi and salads at similar, if not better, prices than neighbouring fast-food deep fried giants. Many of itsu restaurant’s ingredients are supplied by Metcalfe’s highly innovative itsu [grocery] company. itsu [grocery] has around 100 products across ambient, frozen, and chilled in over 94,000 supermarkets and health food shops across Europe. Alongside nurturing award-winning seaweed’thins, gyoza & broths Julian and his grocery team continue to innovate on their journey to becoming the number 1. Asian-inspired brand in the UK, Europe & the USA. There are currently about 100 restaurants across the UK and Europe, with plans to open hundreds more company owned and franchise sites over the coming years.
Q: What drives you?
[Julian Metcalfe]: It’s a difficult one to express in a few sentences, but about an hour ago I went into Pret a Manger, just up the road from our office here in Victoria—and let me try to summarise. Not everything is perfect in any business you build, even years later. But the feeling I got from the customer experience in that place was pretty magnificent. The display, the confidence, the quality of the food—everything about the way it expressed itself felt, in my opinion, like a dream for a customer. It was just spot on. And like any business, it’s kind of unique—it’s got its own character, its own vision. And in my opinion, this morning, that vision was expressed very, very well.
It was packed with people, and I stood there watching. The staff and manager working there don’t know me—I don’t know them, I haven’t worked with them for a few years. But then in walked someone from the buying team, and I’d worked with her years ago. Seeing her now as head of that team was incredible—watching her confidence, her pride. And in a way, those two things: number one, the vision—a pursuit of excellence becoming real and the way it touches people, touches consumers—it’s a magnificent and wonderful thing, like creating art. And then, the pride and joy of the people.
Not all the time, of course—but this happened to me just an hour ago, and as I sit with you now, it’s reminded me why I do this and why I love it. Because you can make a vision real. You can make a vision for a product real, or an experience—like Pret a Manger. A place where, on the whole, you can get really, really good food, really quickly, made by people who really care. The vision isn’t perfect, but it became real. And it’s the pursuit of that vision.
So, anyone thinking about starting a business and wondering what the secret sauce is—well, there isn’t one. But it is vital that you never, ever, ever stop pursuing excellence. And that is elusive. It’s very elusive. It calls for a lot of honesty. A lot.
Q: What binds culture together?
[Julian Metcalfe]: There are hundreds of books written about this. So quite a few of the people who are interested in culture are probably also people interested in learning how to build a successful business, I’m sure. And they will have read endless books and listened to endless podcasts about the qualities you need to build a business.
But in the end, it’s really not that complicated. It’s about the pursuit of a vision. It’s about being brutally honest each day. It’s about truly understanding the role of housekeeping versus the relationship with your customer.
What I mean by that is—it’s all very well spending a lot of time studying what happened in the last three months, but there’s not much you can do about it. So however good your housekeeping is, however good your finance reporting is, however good your HR is—it’s not really going to drive or change the business compared to your brutal honesty, your teamwork, and the way you approach the pursuit of excellence.
It’s very different. Everyone has a role, of course—but it’s that pursuit of excellence, and a love and respect for your customer and product, which is absolutely fundamental. And I don’t think the books and podcasts cover that enough. I really don’t.
Q: How do you lead for consistency?
[Julian Metcalfe]: Well, I’m 65 years old now, so I’m able to look back and try to answer that question with a degree of authenticity and truth. I do think there has to be a parallel between the vision for what you’re trying to do and allowing the people you work with the freedom and trust to do it. We’ve all often heard it’s all about the people—that being a leader is about your skill in delegating, and things like that. We’ve all heard it, and many of us start off thinking we need to hire very expensive people who will tell us they’re going to do everything, and then we can just leave them to get on with it. It’s absolute nonsense. It doesn’t work like that.
The first thing you’ve got to ask is: do you really, truly share the vision for the product and the experience? If you can get that far, it’s a good start. Then you have to establish: are the people you’re working with free to do it, and can they do it? That sometimes means years of help, support, training, and investment. Sometimes you get lucky and hire people who are so capable they can do it much better than you. But what matters is that everyone is aligned with the vision—what are you trying to do?
Because there’s no right or wrong, I keep explaining to everyone. Take any business, like Pret a Manger or Itsu—it’s neither right nor wrong. You could triple the range and the menu. Would that be right? Would it be wrong? The challenge is: what would it do to the harmony? There’s another key word—harmony. Every business, in a way, is about harmony. If you don’t have that sense of harmony and alignment in the pursuit of excellence and the vision, it’s going to be tricky. It’s going to be rough.
Some people in business think their product is going to be immensely successful, when quite clearly it’s not. Quite clearly, the customers don’t agree with them. And that can be a problem. It’s funny, isn’t it? I don’t know what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Podcasts and books—we’ve all spent years, an untold amount of time, trying to work out what it is. And my answer is: there is no one thing. But it does need a sense of alignment—what is the vision, what are we trying to do?
Q: What is the role of resilience in entrepreneurship?
[Julian Metcalfe]: That’s another thing—let’s just be brutally honest. You use the word resilience, I’ve read hundreds of books where others use the word grit, and people like me talk about failure, rejoicing in failure, embracing failure. So now we have resilience, we have grit, we have embracing failure. Let me be clear: 90% of what people like I do is about failure. I embrace failure every single day. It’s not bad. In the pursuit of excellence, clearly every day is going to involve failure. It’s just a question of how you view it. Do you see it as an opportunity to wow your customers and really engage with them? Or are you prepared to settle for second best—mediocrity?
And I think that’s where the vision comes in. The difference between… I have a young CEO at the grocery business—she joined as an intern aged 26. She’s absolutely remarkable. We all thought we’d signed off a product last week—we’d spent six months working on it, we were all happy with it. She came back for the day because she’s on maternity leave, and she made it quite clear it was not good enough. So what did we all do? We all started again from scratch and made it better. And yesterday, actually, we tasted it—and it’s now much better. All due to an alignment between her, myself, and the rest of the team—and a complete loathing of mediocrity.
I watched this thing the other day which said that of all the businesses in the world, the one never, ever to go into is the restaurant business, because 98% fail. So at all costs, just don’t even go there. I didn’t look at those statistics—and I don’t think they even existed in 1988—and I wouldn’t have cared anyway. But we had to put together, imagine, a jigsaw puzzle. Every single one of those pieces plays a vital role. Maybe my team and I, when we started Pret—or once we’d opened 10 Prets—I had a vision for the finished jigsaw puzzle. And collectively, we—the team, all of us—made it our duty and our goal to slowly put the pieces together: how we respect our staff, how we reward them and thank them, how we promote them and inspire them, how we look after our customers. It’s maybe 250 jigsaw puzzles, and do you know, they come and go. Sometimes they fall on the floor and go under the carpets and you lose them, and you have to have the strength to go looking for them again.
Q: How can leaders stay humble?
[Julian Metcalfe]: The simple answer to that is because there is absolutely no choice. You don’t arrive at beauty, and a wonderful product, and harmony, and everything easily. Quite clearly, by its nature, it’s going to be difficult. So you may want to use that word humility, you may want to use the word discipline, you may want to use the word honesty. It doesn’t matter what words you choose—they all play a role here. And that is: are we aligned? Is this as good as it could be? Is it good enough? I mean, often you have to launch a product and then know you can carry on improving it. But it is, at the end of the day, about the relationship with the customer and your product. And also the beauty of what you can do—how you can enhance people’s lives with a great experience and a great product. Because you can. Music or film or books—there are so many examples where you can really enhance other people’s lives, and you need to understand that and embrace it and love it.
Q: How do you choose the businesses and markets you go into?
[Julian Metcalfe]: That’s a really good question. Because lots of your readers will be thinking, what shall I do? I want to start a company, I want to work for myself—but what am I going to do? And that’s a tricky one. It really is tricky. I always used to say to people in the old days: just pursue something you love and do it better than other people. I don’t know if that’s good advice or bad. I mean, I definitely, absolutely, personally love the development of food. It’s extremely artistic, and the development of an experience you can give customers—I find that wonderful, and an amazing challenge. But other people may love sailing and want to make sails for boats—or it doesn’t matter, IT—it’s extraordinary what you can do in the world of technology, absolutely extraordinary. Or you can make spectacles if you want. You can do it with almost anything. But I do think, clearly, you’ve got to love what you do. You really have to. If you really love fishing, I suppose you could say, can I build a business in the world of fishing? I don’t know. You could set up a shop selling fishing rods and fishing equipment. It depends how ambitious you are. But there are often opportunities in all the areas where people lie—if you love them. It does help to really be engaged. I don’t see how you can get up and go to work every day with so much enthusiasm and care unless you really enjoy it.
Q: What are some of your most important reflections on leading at scale?
[Julian Metcalfe]: It’s a big journey, and it’s sometimes quite a lonely one. So that’s another thing—sometimes being the force behind a business, or the vision behind a business, can be very, very lonely. Because at the end of the day, you’re only as good as the people you’re working with. And both of these businesses—all three—have been built entirely not by me, but by the team. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a lot of very brilliant people. But unfortunately, not everyone is like that. Not everyone is committed. Not everyone is ruthlessly honest. Not everyone has grit and determination. But when you find those qualities in people, it’s incredible what you can do. And those qualities are needed in every department. They really are.
And the question is: how do you find them, how do you promote them? Well, again, I was with two of my senior people the other day and I admitted to them that I was shocking at interviewing people—and they should never, ever let me interview anybody. Because I was too impatient, I wanted people to like me. I just begged them: don’t trust me and don’t put me in front of people. It’s not my strength. I think they probably knew it already, but I think knowing your strengths and your weaknesses is bloody important. It really, really is.
But I’ve also been surrounded, in my 35–40 years in business, by people—some of whom have a tremendous amount of grit, and others who have none but think they do. The corporate ladder is a very confusing thing. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors, I tell you.
Q: How do you use enough technology, without overcorrecting and ruining the customer experience?
[Julian Metcalfe]: We have these conversations all the time. So, in the case of Itsu, we went far too fast into technology. We invested far too much, we let down lots of customers, and we’re putting it right. We’re actually going back to putting much more hospitality and tills into every single Itsu by the end of this year—we’re doing about three each week. Because we screwed up. We went too far. We definitely messed up. We overinvested in screens. That was because, in this country, after Brexit and with inflation, it was quite possible that wages were going to become monstrously high—as they have in some cases. In Switzerland, they pay 32 Euros an hour on Sundays. And whether that’s right or wrong is irrelevant—it just means for the consumer, everything starts becoming unbelievably expensive.
So, there is a role for technology—massive. I mean, there was a time when the idea of self-scanning your groceries walking around Sainsbury’s was inconceivable. There was a time when the way an airport works now would’ve seemed like a different world. Technology is remarkable. But in the world of hospitality, nothing works better than engaged, proud human beings. That’s really what you’re going for when you talk about hospitality. We went too far, actually. We’re winding it back.
Q: What does legacy mean to you?
[Julian Metcalfe]: I’ve never really given it any thought, is the honest answer to that. But if I have to, it’s really not difficult to answer. That is: number one, is the experience and the thing we’ve created together going to carry on giving millions of people joy? In other words, does it have a role? Is it good? Is it worthy of respect? Is it lovely? And if the answer to that is yes, then great. We’ve achieved that.
Secondly, what have all the thousands of people we’ve worked with learnt? Are they stronger? Are they more confident? Have we helped support them as human beings? If the answer to that is yes, then great. Are our customers better off because of what we’ve created? If the answer to that is yes, then great.
And then lastly—and most importantly, I guess you could argue—the people that I work very closely with, my own family: what has been the cost to them? Are we okay? Are we close? Has any damage been done, and has it been rectified? I work with two or three of my children. I’m incredibly lucky, but I don’t take that for granted.
So there are four answers to that question, and they all matter.
Q: Do you think you will ever retire?
[Julian Metcalfe]: Oh, I’ll never stop working because I really enjoy it. It’s like creation. I go to work and it’s like painting. I really love it. And as long as I feel I can still add value—whether that be to the product, the experience, the taste, or to try and share ideas and wisdom with the people I’m working with, many of whom are quite young—it’s incredible. I’m very fortunate to be able to do that. So I will never, ever stop. The job is never done. It could always be better.