"You guys are a f**king ecosystem," yells John Vincent,the chief executive of Leon. The 45-year-old father of two is"dressed in killer heels, ruby-red lipstick and a velvet dressthat leaves little to the imagination". He is also addressingthe company conference. "Welcome to the surreal world ofLeon," says Peter Evans in The Sunday Times. It's fair to saythat Vincent, who founded the healthy-eating fast-food chainin 2004 with Henry Dimbleby, likes to do things differently.
A practitioner of wing tsun, a type of kung fu mastered byBruce Lee, "he sent baristas from Leon's restaurants on anintensive wing tsun course to speed up their hands, sothey could serve coffee faster", says Evans. It appears to beworking. After a shaky start, sales grew by 48% to £37m in2015 as the healthy eating fad became firmly entrenched inthe mainstream.
Later this year, the restaurant will be taking"chicken superclean quinoa salad and sweet potato and okrastew" to America "land of the burger and the 60in waist"."People used to call us the Guardian-reading lesbian brand,"says Vincent. "We're all Guardian-reading lesbians now."
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Hitchhiking? There's an app for that
It was a rail strike that provided French car-sharing start-up BlaBlaCar with its big break. The service, which allows users to book online spare seats on journeys in private cars, struggled to attract customers and investors when it first launched. "People thought we were crazy," Nicolas Brusson, who co-founded the firm with Frederic Mazzella, tells the BBC's Ian Rose and Matthew Wheeler. "They would say, it's interesting but you're doing hitchhiking online and no one's going to do that'." But a major rail shutdown the following year led to a surge in users as passengers looked for other ways to travel.
"It was the first time I realised [the concept] was very useful," says Brusson. Even though passenger numbers went down once the strike was over, they remained at a much higher level as many users returned. Today, BlaBlaCar has a total of 35 million registered users in 22 countries (including one in five adults in France) and four million people use the service every month.
Drivers can only charge for the cost of the journey; technically they're not making a profit, and so don't need to change insurance or pay tax on the money they receive. BlaBlaCar makes money by taking a percentage of the cost of the journeys. The firm's latest round of funding values the company at £1.2bn enough "to make any investor who turned them down ten years ago cry into their cornflakes", say Rose andWheeler.
A novel way to tackle low staff morale
Entrepreneurs can be a handful, as Laurent Potdevin, CEO of Lululemon, knows only too well. The Canadian "athleisure" brand had a torrid year in 2013 when it had to withdraw a line of yoga trousers for being too see-through. At the time, the firm's founder Chip Wilson suggested "the problem lay not so much with the product but with the large thighs of some customers", says Alexandra Frean in The Times. The shares duly plunged and Wilson was "shown the door".
Potdevin, "a soft-spoken Frenchman" who arrived in 2014, tackled low staff morale by decreeing that all meetings should start with a five-minute group meditation. "Now everybody enjoys it," he says. And it's not just the staff. In order to attract "a new generation of millennial shoppers", Lululemon turned its shops "into places for social interaction as well as shopping", notes Frean.
That meant "laying on exercise classes, staging activities with local gyms and making cool spaces to hang out by having an engaged and engaging sales force". Potdevin's "efforts appear to be paying off" and shares in Lululemon recovered by 24% last year.
Bernie Madoff: hero and entrepreneur
Bernie Madoff, the convicted fraudster behind a $65bn Ponzi scheme, fits in well in prison, journalist Steve Fishman tells Ryan Vlastelica on MarketWatch.com. Fishman has just published his interviews with Madoff as a six-part Amazon Audible audio series, Ponzi Supernova, in which he makes the case that Madoff's criminal activities were enabled by a corrupt financial system. The first four episodes were released last week.
"Oddly, I think he's pretty comfortable where he is," says Fishman of Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years behind bars. Both of Madoff's sons died following his conviction, both seemingly as a result of their father's crime. Mark Madoff hanged himself on the second anniversary of his father's arrest, while Andrew Madoff blamed the return of his lymphoma, which had been in remission up to that point, on the stress brought about by the trial. He died in 2014.
And it seems even Bernie Madoff found keeping his crimes a secret stressful. That's why he now feels the "relief of no longer having to hide the fraud", says Vlastelica the series quotes Madoff as saying he wishes he'd been caught earlier.
His satisfaction may also be due to the "exalted status" he holds among his fellow prisoners. "He's a star in prison," agrees Fishman. "He stole more money than anyone in history, and to other thieves, this makes him a hero." They come to the 78-year-old for financial advice. One inmate even consulted Madoff about a stock purchase he was considering with his broker. "The guy later said he wished he had followed Bernie's advice closer."
Old habits die hard, even behind bars. So it's no surprise that Madoff is running a racket in the prison yard. "At one point, he cornered the hot chocolate market," says Fishman. "He bought up every package of Swiss Miss from the commissary and sold it for a profit in the prison yard. He monopolised hot chocolate! He made it so that, if you wanted any, you had to go through Bernie."
