( BIG IDEA ): David Sanger Founder of Rollover Hot Dogs

David Sanger Founder of Rollover Hot Dogs

  It took David Sanger several attempts to discover his true calling in life. After leaving university he initially tried his hand at careers in accountancy and advertising. He also considered a career in law and even horticulture before realising that starting up his own business was what he really wanted to do with his life.


  Born and brought up in South Africa where his father was an expatriate banker, Sanger moved to England at the age of 10. After boarding school and university he joined a large accountancy firm to train as an accountant but after three years narrowly failed his exams and left without qualifying. He says: ‘I hated it. I couldn’t stand working with all these notions, concepts and figures. I wanted something more tangible. The whole experience knocked my confidence and led to a lot of soul-searching.’ 

  He enrolled at horticultural college and also got a place at law school. But in the end he followed neither direction and took a job with an advertising agency instead. After two years, however, he realised that did not suit him either. He says: ‘I got fed up with the endless meetings. The final straw came when six people spent several days trying to decide the background colour for a poster.’ 

  Sanger finally decided the solution was to start his own business. He had no idea what his business would actually do though, so he started looking around for ideas. Initially he thought about opening his own advertising agency. Then became interested in the idea of opening a shoe shop. He says: ‘My idea was to sell only the main sizes of shoes, in basic colours, because I read in a book from Harvard Business School that 80 per cent of men have feet sized between 7 and 10. But then I thought actually no, I really don’t want to sell shoes.’ Eventually he hit upon the idea of opening a chain of sandwich bars so in 2001 at the age of 25 he left his job in advertising.

  Using savings of £50,000 and £50,000 borrowed from the bank he opened his first shop in West London and called it Rollover, partly because it was an accounting term and madeDavid Sanger 39 him laugh. His unique selling point was freshly baked baguettes filled straight from the oven.

But with no experience of the food industry Sanger soon found himself struggling. He was working from 5am to 9pm six days a week but the shop was losing money and after just three months he hit crisis point. He says: ‘I was working like a slave, unable to pay myself any salary, with a gloomy future and a 15-year lease. I knew I had to either throw in the towel and go back to being an employee – or find a way of making it work.’

  In desperation he decided the answer was to find some wholesale customers. So he hired a manager to run the shop while he went out to secure bulk orders from local hotels and hospitals. Within two months sales had tripled and the business had turned the corner. By 1995 Sanger had managed to grow the business to eight Rollover sandwich bars. But it was clear that they were never going to make him his fortune.

  Then one day he was in Copenhagen for the weekend with his Danish girlfriend when he bought a hot dog from a street stall and realised that everyone around him was doing the same. It was at that point he had his big idea. He says: ‘They were delicious and I wondered why I would never eat one Fact file

Date of birth: 16 June 1965
Marital status: married with two children
Qualifications: BA (Hons) in economics and politics from Exeter University
Interests: growing bonsai trees, playing squash, swimming, watching rugby
Personal philosophy: ‘Live every day as if it is your last.’ in the UK. I realised it was because at home there was a perception that hot dogs were a poor quality product and something that only children ate. But in Denmark everyone was eating them. So I decided this was the thing for me.’

  Even better, unlike those he had eaten in England, these hot dogs were made using a special machine that inserted the sausage right inside the bread roll so that it was completely enclosed, making the hot dog easy to hold and far less messy to eat than conventional ones.

  Sanger spent the rest of his weekend in Copenhagen quizzing the street sellers about their hot dogs. He says: ‘I drove them all mad asking them questions about how they do it, where they get the hot dogs from, how many they sell.’

  By the end of the weekend he had bought a hot dog machine from one of them for £500. When he got it home he asked a British manufacturer to modify the machine so that his customers could see what was going on inside. He says:

  ‘It was a stainless steel box with a spike at one end. All the Danes knew what was inside but I needed to make it understandable for the British consumer who was not used to buying hot dogs. So we changed the stainless steel box to a glass drum so people could see the sausages standing up.’ Then he installed it in one of his sandwich shops, importing high quality sausages from Germany and putting them inside baguettes instead of bread rolls. Soon sales were going so well from that one machine that he asked the manufacturer to make seven more identical ones to put in all his shops.

  The name came about by accident. He says: ‘We used to wrap our hot dogs in our Rollover sandwich bar napkins and customers would come in and ask for a rollover with ketchup. We hadn’t intended that to happen but the name stuck.’

  One day the landlady of his local pub asked Sanger if she could borrow a machine to make hot dogs for customers watching the rugby international match. He said yes and lent her the machine for the day. She sold out of hot dogs before the match had even started. Two weeks later the pub’s area manager called to see if he could hire six machines to install in other pubs and Sanger’s wholesale hot dog business was born. He started selling hot dog machines to pubs and clubs and supplying them with the bread and sausages. It went so well that in 1997 Sanger sold his original sandwich bars for a total of £350,000 to concentrate on growing the hot dog business.

  It did not all go according to plan, however. Flushed by the success of his hot dog machines, he decided to open hot dog retail outlets in shopping centres. The first three did well so he went on a high-speed opening spree with £750,000 he borrowed from the bank. He admits: ‘I got caught up in it. I opened 18 outlets in 18 months. But it was an absolute disaster. There were staff irregularities and theft and they were losing money. But being an optimist I kept focusing on the good ones instead of the ones that were doing disastrously.’
Fortunately, after 18 months Sanger finally came to his senses and called a halt. Then he spent the next 18 months closing the worst outlets and franchising the rest, losing a great deal of money in the process. He says: ‘It was a huge learning curve. I learnt that you have to focus on the whole picture not just on the bit of the picture that you want to see.

  The failure was not in trying retail, the failure was in doing it too quickly and not stopping and analysing whether it was the right course of action.’ Happily, the wholesaling operation remained strong and enabled Rollover to survive its turbulent retail period.
Rollover now sells 25 million hot dogs a year and supplies most premiership football clubs, theme parks and concert halls in the country. It makes eight different varieties of hot dog including chicken and vegetarian and had sales of around £10 million in 2006. In the same year Sanger sold the business for a substantial undisclosed sum to Piper Equity, retaining a 21 per cent stake in the business and staying on as a non-executive director.

In 2008 he bought the UK rights to ScentAir, which supplies air scenting equipment and cartridges to hotels and restaurants.

  Sanger, 44, went on to marry the girlfriend he went to Copenhagen with and still can’t believe that going on that weekend trip with her provided the inspiration for his success.

  He says: ‘I am enormously proud of what I’ve achieved. It has definitely been worth it. It is not making money that has inspired me, it is wanting to be the biggest and best.’

  He thinks that finding a good business idea is just a matter of keeping your eyes open. He says: ‘Very few of us wake up and invent a mobile phone or a new car engine. Most of us just tweak something that has been around and improve it.

  Entrepreneurs aren’t generally born with a vocation, they tend to look at lots of ideas and jump on the train of opportunity as it races past.