Jamie Oliver and Adriano Zumbo show that fame doesn’t guarantee success

Jamie Oliver has opened up about the collapse of his restaurant chain last year, with admissions of gagging orders for staff, personal injections of £13 million hours before the chain was to go under and further criticism of his decision to hire his brother-in-law Paul Hunt to run his business in 2014.

Last September Oliver’s restaurant chain of 37 restaurants was on the brink of total collapse. Oliver stepped in to remedy a mess not of his making, but not everyone was happy with the fact that 600 people had to lose their jobs in a restructure that he maintained was needed to save the remaining 1600 jobs.

“I had two hours to put money in and save it or the whole thing would go to shit that day or the next day,” he said. Oliver says the chain had “simply run out of cash”, a predicament that he conceded was “just not normal, in any business”.

Let’s not worry too much about Oliver’s financial health, despite the fact that 40 per cent of his business ventures were failures and he has lost £90 million of his wealth since 2014. He is still minted. But it does beg the question whether cooking and bookkeeping are two ingredients that simply cannot be mixed. Take away Oliver’s media empire and he might well be in serious financial trouble if he had to rely on his restaurants alone.

But he’s not the only one, with Adriano Zumbo also taking everyone by surprise, except perhaps his creditors, with news his company was going into voluntary administration. Again, his shiny TV image allowed him to expand at a rapid rate with various venues, and again he had family involved at high levels within his business – his sister Rosalba is a director and his girlfriend Nelly Riggio is retail operations manager in the business.

There were some red flags last year that things weren’t going well when A Current Affair accused Zumbo of underpaying his staff. But it appears it was Melbourne high tea room Fancy Nance that brought him down. When a business drops the ball on paying its staff but comes up with a $65 dessert degustation menu it may be a sign that reality has left the building.

Sheridan Randall - 4/9/18