PizzaExpress founder Peter Boizot

Company: PizzaExpress
Founder: Peter Boizot
Age at start: 35
Background: Sales, teaching, journalism and street selling
Start Year: 1965
Business: Pizzeria

PizzaExpress is sufficiently well known that it needs almost no introduction. Today it operates 350 pizza restaurants in the UK and Europe, and has made several entrepreneurs justly successful and famous.

In 1965 when Peter Boizot opened the first ever PizzaExpress, its future was much harder to predict.

Peter returned home from a stint working and traveling in Italy but couldn't find even a slice of pizza anywhere in England, let alone a pizzeria. Convinced of the potential, he swiftly set about changing that.

Culinary inspiration
Peter's taste buds first sampled pizza in 1948 when his headmaster dispatched him, aged 18, on a three-month foreign exchange programme to experience life with the Uzielli de Mari family, in Forte dei Marmi near Pisa, Tuscany.

Pizza was a favourite in the Uzielli de Mari household and soon became equally admired by its enthusiastic guest. Peter, repulsed by blood and the slaughter of animals, at the age of five had turned vegetarian and had subsequently grown up on a bland variation British staple meat and boiled veg, minus the meat.

Discovering pizza was a revelation. In Peter's PizzaExpress Cookbook, written in 1976 (Penguin Group Ltd), he says: "It was colourful to look at, fragrant to smell, succulent to taste."

"As a non-meat eater to eat a pizza with mozzarella with tomato on a pastry base with an olive or two was just up my street. The pizza became, from that moment, a food which was to nurture my body and my pocket for many years to come."

After completing his National Service in Egypt and studying History at Cambridge University, in 1953 Peter seized the opportunity to live abroad again.

A short spell teaching in Paris was followed by a period working for Nestlé in Switzerland, while a move into sales took him to Germany and on visits across much of Europe before he made his way back to Italy and its capital, Rome.

Here, Peter first showed his entrepreneurial flair, which he insists was always part of his genetic make-up, combining work as a journalist for the Associated Press with selling souvenirs and postcards to tourists from a barrow in St Peter's in Vincoli Square.

Long, tiring but enjoyable days were rewarded with heady nights of pizza and wine. Peter was in heaven.

Deciding to go it alone
Eventually the pull of home and the nagging conscience to pursue a career took him back to England, but he was determined not to leave his love for pizza in Italy for a second time - or at least that was the plan.

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"Back in England, I just couldn't find a pizza - not even the Italian restaurants did them," he insists.

Driven by a yearning to live life as an individual and a reluctance to work for someone else, Peter decided to solve this problem himself.

"Sick of them not existing, I thought 'why don't I open my own place?' So in 1965, that's what I did."

Starting up
Peter's mantra was authenticity. He wanted to make, sell and, yes, eat real Italian pizza, albeit made in the UK.

The first job was to buy a proper Italian pizza oven - and there was only one place to start.

"I flew to the home of pizza, Naples, got in a cab and said 'take me to your local pizzeria'," recalls Peter.

"There I was sent to meet Signor Notaro, a manufacturer of ovens, who agreed, for £600, which was a lot of money back then, to send it to England along with an Italian chef to work it."

Aside from an authentic oven, the other 'essential' was real mozzarella. Shipping from Italy every week in the 1960s was unrealistic, but Peter tracked down London's only mozzarella producer and agreed a deal for exclusive supply - and a whole lot more than he'd originally bargained for.

The deal didn't just secure Peter an unrivalled cheese supply, but also the now great PizzaExpress name and his first premises.

The mozzarella factory was owned by Margaret Zampi, widow of the late film director Mario Zampi, who several years before his death had unsuccessfully tried to launch a pizza restaurant, named PizzaExpress, on Wardour Street in London's Soho.

"He'd done everything properly. It was the ideal setting, he imported an oven, even set up a cheese factory," says Peter. "However, movie stars craved more luxurious food and unfortunately Zampi, with his simple pizza, was ahead of his time."

Zampi eventually caved in, undertook an expensive refurbishment, changed the name to The Romanella and began offered standard Italian fare. Despite initial success, The Romanella had fallen on hard times following Zampi's death and was on the verge of liquidation.

Peter saw it as an opportunity, however, so he borrowed £100 from a friend, Renee, and made an offer to acquire the ailing company from the widow.

"She was most helpful and she agreed to sell me the shares of PizzaExpress Ltd," says Peter in his much loved cookbook. It's since proved a fine investment of course, but at the time, he wasn't so sure.

"I took on the staggering task of repaying creditors £14,000. It seemed a lunatic deal," he admits.

Pursuing the Italian vision
Despite securing the keys to 29 Wardour Street, a prime location at the centre of London's nightlife and dining, it was to be months before Peter opened. In a decision he was later to at least partly reverse, Peter decided there was no need for the plush décor of The Romanella in a modern pizzeria and set about ripping it all out.

However, with insufficient tools and labour, or money to pay for either, it proved a frustrating and turbulent process.

To make matters worse, Peter's one tonne Italian oven made it across Europe and over the channel but was never going to fit through the front door, forcing them to knock down a sidewall to accommodate it. Confused at holding paintbrushes instead of spinning dough, Peter's Italian manager left and his imported chef handed in his notice.

Peter had to act fast, and swiftly found chef Rino Silvestri, from Naples, to step in.

When the first PizzaExpress eventually opened its doors, trade was slow.

"Only people who had been to Italy had tried pizza and it was obvious my idea was not properly understood by the denizens of Soho," he says. "We started by cutting large pizzas into eight slices and giving them away on grease-proof paper through the front window.

"People loved it and would walk by shouting, but when we started to charge (at two shillings (10p) a slice, business began to wane."

Peter was fiercely determined to persevere and rejected calls by onlookers and well-meaning advisors to supplement his menu with more familiar British favourites, such as chips and sandwiches.

He opened before lunch and didn't close until four or five in the morning, picking up trade from the late night drinkers who stopped by for a slice.

Adapting the business plan
While he flatly refused to compromise on his pure pizza vision, eventually Peter was persuaded to revise his business plan. Ronald Simson, a friend from Cambridge and City banker Peter had turned to for investment, suggested they move slightly upmarket.

"I had this romantic rustica idea of selling everyday-life Italian food served up on grease-proof paper or paper plates. However, it's a difficult economic base to grow from as people stay a long time and spend little. We didn't have a nice enough décor to attract higher reaches of Soho, so Simpson suggested we should trade up a little."

Together with Simpson, Peter was able to raise enough money for this improvement.

For the redesign, Peter turned to Italian designer Enzo Apicella, who later worked on 85 PizzaExpress restaurants and was responsible for designing its famous art nouveau logo and "PizzaPizzaPizza" window pattern.

In came a wine menu, dining tables and simple but attractive furnishings - the first restaurant to resemble the format we all now know and love.

Express expansion
Within three or four months, the relaunched PizzaExpress was bringing in a healthy £2,000 to 3,000 a week in sales.

Peter is proud to have brought over the first Peroni beers from Italy, as he approached the manufacturer in Naples and asked to sell it in his pizzeria in England.

A second restaurant followed 18 months later in a former dairy factory on Bloomsbury's Coptic Street next to the British Museum. Peter says that this step is never easy for any business, but the company adjusted and expanded accordingly.

Enzo again designed it with a remit to replicate the aura of the first PizzaExpress but with a completely unique design and décor.

But Peter insists he did not envisage a chain in the early days: "I always loathed the idea of a chain. It's well documented that I saw the PizzaExpress company as a necklace with each restaurant being an individual and unique gem. Each time we opened a restaurant we added a gem."

The Coptic Street restaurant was the first to feature original artwork on the walls and live jazz, something which, along with the deliberate sourcing of unusual and unique buildings, continues to set both PizzaExpress and its individual restaurants aside.

Roll-out
Expansion followed steadily and then rapidly throughout the '70s, '80s and early '90s through traditional roll-out and - briefly - a franchising model, as the nation quickly developed a hunger for pizza.

For most of this time, the business was generating more cash than it needed to grow, so little extra finance was required. Peter acknowledges, though, that he was fortunate to have a "generally helpful bank" and that his original investor Simpson remained an active investor for many years.

The opening of the 50th PizzaExpress restaurant on South King Street in Manchester in the 1980s stands out to Peter as his proudest moment.

"It felt like a real achievement," he says. "Like we'd finally become a big company.

Peter eventually sold his shares to the PizzaExpress company in 1993, a group consisting of David Page's G+F holdings, Star Computers (a front company for Luke Johnson and Hugh Osmond) and Matthew Allen.

Since then the company has been floated on the stock exchange, taken private again, and made fortunes for the three now well-known entrepreneurs, Johnson, Osmond and Page.

The company is currently owned by more recent competitor ASK Pizza & Pasta - but PizzaExpress remains the market leader in the UK.

Entrepreneurial vision
Looking back even to the earliest days of struggle and sale by the slice, Peter is adamant he never doubted the potential of pizza or that he was the man to introduce it to the UK public's palates.

"The world was my oyster! I believed I could go as far as I could," he insists.

"I liked doing my own thing and so took well to being my own boss. I don't regret anything, and wouldn't change a thing."

Where are they now?
Peter Boizot has since gone on to own other businesses, including restaurants, hotels, retail property and Peterborough United Football Club, as well as becoming heavily involved in the jazz scene - starting the Soho Jazz Festival.

He also played hockey competitively until into his late 60s!

Now, at the age of 77, he's just as passionate about life, business and PizzaExpress as ever.

"I'm not involved on a day-to-day basis anymore and it's not my company, but I am its president," he says. "They pay me a salary still and if they want my advice then they know where I am!"

David Lester is a successful entrepreneur, the founder of the small business website startups.co.uk and the co-author of How They Started (Crimson Publishing, £12.95)