Pret & Itsu Founder: How I Built TWO Billion Dollar Brands At The Same Time!: Julian Metcalfe | E173

Metcalfe links his loneliness, lack of affection, and bad experiences with authority to his later distrust of institutions and compulsion to forge his own path. However, he is careful to stress that tragedy is not essential for achievement; people without dark pasts should not feel disqualified from doing extraordinary work.

He argues most businesses lack internal transparency because people protect their status, pay and insecurities. By contrast, he advocates openly sharing financials, saying what you actually think, and building cultures where people can speak freely. If your employer isn’t transparent, his advice is blunt: move jobs.

Metcalfe largely ignores spreadsheets in favor of obsessing over food quality, staff pride, and customer relationships. At Pret, practices like delivering unsold food nightly to the homeless and empowering staff to give products away for free were seen as common sense ways to build long‑term loyalty, despite consultants calling them irrational.

Pret allowed shop teams to vote on whether trial employees were hired, and introduced ‘Buddy Days’ where office staff worked in stores. When one abusive manager was fired and a frontline worker was promoted, store culture transformed and sales doubled or tripled—illustrating how trust and empowerment outperform top‑down control.

Metcalfe insists he “had no idea” what he was doing with Pret and still regularly casts himself into ‘never‑never land’ with itsu. By deliberately entering uncharted territory, listening hard, and accepting constant failure, he created entirely new food formats and operating systems instead of incrementally tweaking existing models.