IQBAL WAHHAB OBE
Iqbal is the founder of Tandoori Magazine, and acclaimed restaurants The Cinnamon Club and Roast.
Never one to rest on his laurels, he is planning a number of new, purpose driven restaurants.
We're delighted to speak to him during Write A Business Plan month.
All information and links were correct at the date of original publication on
3 Dec 2021
Writing a Business Plan. Was it a good idea?
Most people when writing a business plan think it’s a good idea.
The key is to test it out with friends and colleagues who you can trust to tell you whether it needs changing before going to market with it.
Invariably first business plans are wrong and the businesses that fail are typically ones who didn’t get the tyres kicked on theirs.
What did you learn?
That there’s a lot about the business that I haven’t paid sufficient attention to!
You have to have an end-to-end understanding of what you aim to achieve so that others can’t pull a fast one on you. And believe me, people will.
If you don't like the position, size or placement of the photos, grab, move, rotate or resize them until you do!
Did you start without one?
I started The Cinnamon Club with a massive Investment Memorandum which I convinced an accountant to prepare and a designer to do sketches for in return for shares in the business as I didn’t have money to pay for the exercise.
Where did you start?
As a first venture, to start with the unequivocal ambition of creating the world’s most successful Indian restaurant has “failure” stamped all over it and there were many times we nearly did fail but by our third year, we achieved that milestone.
Today I’m just completing a deal to open four very different restaurants across central London in 2022.