Inside rise of Pret boss who went from being taxi driver’s son getting paid £2.75-an-hour at McDonald’s after leaving school aged 16 to become £400K-a-year CEO of global sandwich chain
- Pano Christou, 45, has been the head of Pret since 2019, seeing it through Covid
- He grew up in South London with and his first job was at in McDonald’s, aged 16
He is the son of a taxi driver who went from getting paid £2.75-an-hour at McDonald’s to becoming the £400,000-a-year boss of global sandwich chain Pret A Manger.
Coming from a humble background, Pano Christou grew up in Tooting, South London – where his half-Greek, half Italian father was a mini-cab driver and his mother was a nurse from Cyprus who at one stage was forced to also work as a cleaner for extra cash.
With clothes from a jumble sale on his back, he left school at 16 and joined McDonald’s on a low salary.
He then went on to join Pret, rapidly rising through the ranks to become CEO of the high street chain.
The married father-of-two, 45, has now given thousands of Pret staff their third pay rise in a year.
Pano Christou (pictured) commands a salary of £400,000 as Pret’s chief executive having started on just £2.75-an-hour when he began working at McDonald’s at 16
Money was tight, with clothes coming from jumble sales. The day-to-day struggle inspired Mr Christou to begin work from an early age.
‘My first job, at 14/15, was delivering mini-cabs cards through doors. I washed my father’s car every Sunday,’ he told the Mirror. ‘He would pay me a pound or two, but I would probably find more change under the seats then he paid me.’
He skipped university in favour of a job at McDonald’s at 16 – where he earnt £2.75-an-hour, ‘to my parents’ displeasure’. But rather being the dead end they feared, he had fallen in love with the business of hospitality and a couple of years later had begun his career at Pret.
‘My mum and dad were not at all happy then, but they are happy now,’ he said.
Starting at the company at 22, he became their third chief executive in 2019, following Julian Metcalfe and his mentor Clive Schlee, who was at the helm for 18 years. His salary stands at £400,000 and he received long-term share options, linked to performance, taking the total for last year to £4million. Now he has ambitions of making the firm a global powerhouse – but believes that staff must get the cash they deserve.
Knowing how tough life can be on a budget – having seen his parents struggle to make ends meet as a child, he is now looking to increase the salary of thousands of his staff in the third pay rise in just 12 months
He said: ‘If you pay people what they should be paid, you shouldn’t have a staff problem. I want us to pay more than the competition.’
About 7,800 UK shop staff will be getting an extra three per cent rise in April, meaning the average base pay will have ballooned 19 per cent in 12 months. At £10.60 an hour, its lowest paid workers will still get just 18p an hour above the national living wage for 23-year-olds and above. And baristas will get up to £14.10 an hour depending on where they live and their experience, making them the ‘highest paid in the industry’, Pret said.
Meanwhile, staff will continue to get free food and drink while on shift and a 50 per cent discount at other times.
Mr Christou said he ‘wouldn’t be surprised’ if he looked at another increase ‘at some point this year’ for his staff.
‘It depends on inflation, whether it continues to push up,’ he said, as he warned prices may have to go up for customers.
He has already been forced to deal with one nightmare after another almost from the moment he took the helm at Pret.
From April Baristas at Pret will get up to £14.10 an hour depending on where they live and their experience. Pictured is a Pret show in London’s Leicester Square
Having survived Covid in 2020 – which saw millions lost in revenue and staff left on furlough, Pret is now having to deal with huge increases in fuel bills, just like countless other businesses.
‘Energy costs are huge for us,’ he says in an interview with the Mail on Sunday. ‘It is the number one cost challenge we’re facing now’.
Ingredients in Pret products are also going up. Sunflower oil, much of which comes from Ukraine, is rising in price, as is wheat.
Entrepreneurs Julian Metcalfe and Sinclair Beecham opened the first Pret store in London’s Victoria in 1986.
In response to the cost of living crisis, Pret has launched a range of cheaper products.
‘It’s not a meal deal per se, but the idea is that you can buy a can of drink, a baguette or a sandwich and some crisps for under £6,’ says Christou.
All of this comes when Pret is still recovering from the pandemic, when it stayed afloat only thanks to a capital injection of £185million in February 2021, then a further £106million in November 2021. He said: ‘I was seriously worried of course. We were losing millions a day, burning cash. Furlough was a lifeline. It was very hard. Seeing a business you have been part of for so many years just disappear in front of you’.
The company made a pre-tax loss of just under £270million in 2021 but in the summer said it had returned to profit for the first time since the pandemic, after pivoting from city centre to out-of-town shops.
Pret has 430 stores in the UK, some 200 of them in London. As a result of Covid, Christou says ‘we re-evaluated the estate,’ closing about 30 stores, of which five have come back, and opening 30 to 40 new ones.
He has ambitions of becoming a global brand on a par with McDonald’s. But that makes expanding in the UK – and growing overseas, adding to the existing 200 outlets in the US, Europe, and further afield.
‘We want to be genuinely worldwide. Why can’t it be like McDonald’s – we haven’t really got a British brand that has done that, so this is our aim,’ he said.
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