My first million: making big deals out of Indian meals

Charan Gill landed in Glasgow in 1963 aged nine with his Punjabi grandfather's words ringing in his ears. He would, said his grandfather, be judged on his ambitions.

The bus conductor's son, who at that time barely spoke English, would later prove that he didn't lack ambition but initially, there was little to be judged.

Against his teacher's advice, he left school in 1969 at the age of 16 and took a job at Yarrow's Shipyard on the Clyde as a turner and fitter. He enjoyed the work, but in 1974 a chance encounter with an old friend, Gurmail Dhillon, who ran the Ashoka Indian restaurant on Glasgow's Argyle Street, changed the course of his life.

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"I was walking past his restaurant and he looked a bit stressed out. So I asked whether he needed any help." He took on a second job at the restaurant, starting off by cleaning toilets, then graduating to peeling onions, all the while still holding down the job at Yarrow's. Six years later and he was managing the restaurant, where he now worked full time. His working day started at 7am and didn't end until after midnight, but this didn't worry him. "My other job was my hobby. I really enjoyed the social aspect of my work." The money was also good. At £7 for a weekend shift, it was more than double what he was making at Yarrow's.

By 1983, Gill was working full time at the Ashoka so when he was offered the chance to buy a sixth share in it, he knew it was something he wanted to do. "I needed £6,000 and a bank manager who knew me said he'd give me £3,000 if I could get the other £3,000."

He managed to raise the money by borrowing £100 here and £100 there from his friends. But a year on, the six-way partnership wasn't working out because the other partners wanted to concentrate on their own ventures, so he and Dhillon bought the others out.

"It was frightening," says Gill. The restaurant was bringing in few customers and making very little money. But some clever marketing brought the punters piling in. Gill's stunts included trawling through the Glasgow phone directory to find a man called Rick Shaw, who he then employed to deliver takeaways by rickshaw. And while walking the 96 miles of the West Highland Way, he got a helicopter to deliver a takeaway to him as he rested at Loch Lomond. Soon, Indian curry was as central to the Glaswegian diet as Irn Bru and turnover had rocketed from £1,500 a week to £15,000 in just four years.

When an opportunity came to purchase a restaurant across the street, Gill picked it up. At the time, he did so more "to protect my territory" than anything else, but the acquisition nonetheless kicked off a grand expansion. By 2005, the chain had 17 branches and was turning over £12m a year. Yet the huge success of Gill's restaurants wasn't enough to make him want to keep them: that same year, he sold up. Why? Because "life's too short to be doing one thing", says Gill, who now focuses on property development. But perhaps more to the point, Gill made a reported £8m from the sale, meaning "I'll never have to work again".