When you look at the man, you wonder how Peter ‘Fats’ Lazarides ever acquired his nickname. He has plenty to be pleased about after having started the South African Ocean Basket seafood franchise from scratch. Aside from power cuts, Lazarides says the biggest challenge is managing queues, the waiters and kitchen staff.
“The turnover has been there. I always say people have to eat.”
Another worry is the Fish and Chips outlets that try to tempt weekend diners away from his tables. It’s just one of the many trials he’s experienced during his 18 years in the business.
Lazarides, his brother, George, and a third partner, George Nichas, opened their first Ocean Basket restaurant in Pretoria, sitting a mere 30 people.
Lazarides worked at a supermarket, while he was looking for a place to set up shop. A phone call from his wife alerted him that she had found a place. The only problem was 40 other people were after the lease.
With the simple idea of serving seafood in a pan, in his head, Lazarides set out to talk to the leaser, whom he convinced of the unheard-of idea.
Five months later, on April 12, 1995, the first store opened at Menlyn Park Shopping Center, in Pretoria, but with strict limitations on their five-year lease. The contract stated that the restaurant could only sell one type of wine and two types of cold drinks. No desserts or salads were allowed and the store had shorter opening hours. With the odds stacked against them, the restaurant became a surprise hit. People queued for the fresh seafood and brought along with them their own bread, salads and cold drinks.
“I think it’s just a drive, basically for me it was a drive to do something very successful in my life and it doesn’t mean the first thing I did, turned out to be successful,” says Lazarides.
Their business model was to sell inexpensive seafood in shopping centers surrounded by large numbers of homes.
The knowledge to run this fast-growing franchise didn’t come overnight. Lazarides dropped out of school in grade eight, then tried to return to complete grade 10, but says it was a disaster. He thought he’d be lucky on the third attempt at college to finish grades 11 and 12 but he simply wasn’t interested enough in his studies. Instead, in 1977, he went to sea to his compulsory national service.
This was during South Africa’s apartheid-era conscription, when young men would do their national service and then have around 10 years of call-ups. While with the Navy, he talked his way out of the call-ups and managed to get an exemption to allow a short service of only three years.
Back on land, Lazarides drew on his Grecian roots of running cafés, coffee shops and corner shops.
He dabbled with the idea of running a restaurant, in 1981, while working at an establishment at Sun City holiday resort, in the North West province. He returned to Pretoria to learn two trades—one from his father, who was a carpenter, and the other on how to be a plumber and shop fitter. But he was still confused about what he wanted to do with his life.
Then came the epiphany in Menlyn Park. Ocean Basket was to become an international success story with 165 stores worldwide. He attributes the restaurants’ success to their strict focus on seafood.
The seafood franchise has opened restaurants in Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia and Mauritius. In late 2012, Nigeria saw its first Ocean Basket open in the upmarket area of Victoria Island, in Lagos.
The partners returned to their Mediterranean roots on the island of Cyprus in 2008, where six stores  and a distribution center were opened.
There’s even a high-speed sushi bar at Africa’s biggest international airport in Johannesburg—O.R. Tambo.
There are plans to expand to petrol stations across South Africa. The experiment has begun in Middleburg, south west of Johannesburg, as well as Cyprus. Lazarides hopes to expand the project.
The partners plan to open at least 200 stores by the end of 2014 and another 200 during the following 10 years, by expanding into Ghana, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
The group’s global turnover is around R2 billion ($224.1 million) for the stores and the four warehouses. An Ocean Basket establishment makes, on average, nearly R8.5 million ($952,000) a year, while the setup costs are about R2.5 million ($270,500). Lazarides wants more people to buy into his franchise; he is encouraging them to do so by cutting the setup cost by 20%.
As the seafood retail space gets more competitive with the popping up of many over-the-counter fish-and-chips outlets and other seafood restaurants, Lazarides says this will not put a damper on his expansion plans.
He believes his three-step recipe to success: good food, good service and good price will keep customers returning to Ocean Basket. At least now they don’t need to bring their own salads.

Fats Fishing For A Fortune

Emilia de Sousa is small, but tough. She’s had to be. Founding “Old Fashioned” Fish And Chips, South Africa’s biggest fish &amp; chips franchise, has been a struggle every step of the way. It has been a long and painful road from a tiny corner shop in the east of Johannesburg to 350 stores in South Africa and millions of rands.
It all began when the South American-born de Sousa started helping her uncle in his corner shop as a teenager. De Sousa was from a family of immigrants who came to South Africa from Curaçao Island, on the coast of Venezuela.
The little fish and chips shop taught de Sousa the basics: discipline and hard work. She worked behind the till, mixed the batter, peeled the potatoes, fried the fish and fed her dreams.
“You know when I had this shop, every single day people used to ask me ‘Why don’t you franchise? Can I buy this one?’ and I had this thing in my mind, [that one day] I will franchise because there were so many people [asking for it]”.
She began franchising the business in 2005, after opening her first store 10 years earlier; shortly after the release of Nelson Mandela, when many people were packing up and leaving, fearing new leadership under a new government, de Sousa embraced the change and even attended Madiba’s first birthday in freedom, following his release from Robben Island.
“…When Nelson Mandela came out [of prison] I actually met [him]. I met him at Sacred Heart College… Now I think I should have taken a photo,” she laughs.
At the time when many were skeptical about the incoming government and scared for their safety, she stuck to her adopted country.
“I was never frightened. I have got this thing that ‘when it’s your time, it’s your time. It doesn’t matter where you are’. And this is such a beautiful country we’ve got, I’ve travelled a lot and this country is still the most beautiful country to me,” says de Sousa.
It is a beautiful country, but it was also harsh on young de Sousa. To complicate matters she was a mother at 16.
“As a single mom for 27 years, I [have] also started my life tough. I had to bring up three kids on my own. I never got a cent from maintenance or anything like that. I’m the type of person [who says] ‘Don’t just sit down and cry about it. Do something’.
“I’ll never forget I went to court for maintenance and the [female] prosecutor turned around and told me, ‘You must pay your husband maintenance, he says he is not working’. I turned around and said ‘What a lie… Cheers my friend. Never see me again’. The tears were running down my face I couldn’t believe what she had said to me,” says de Sousa.
Following her divorce, the young mother had begun selling second-hand clothes to make ends meet and it worked out well. Soon she was back to the original plan, opening up her own fish and chips shop like she had once done with her uncle, selling quality food at low prices.
“I don’t believe in ripping people off, if you look around [in a mall], say they are selling their handbags for three or 2,000 [but] nobody is in the shop. But if they had cheaper bags, that are still good [quality], there would be more people in the shop… It’s the same with food, but some people just want to make money.”
One of her problems in the early days was making money.
“I did have very hard times [starting] the business and I used to work hard [trying] to put money together… I remember I went and borrowed money and these people charged me about five times more and I paid them back… I paid them all that money,” says de Sousa.
As the money problems were solved, grim, violent, reality visited her business. A gang of robbers sneaked into her shop and attacked her.
“When I got to work the door was closed, they were waiting inside for me because I had the money. There were three of them, the first one pulled out the gun, the second one ran with the money and the third one stabbed me in the back and just missed my heart,” says De Sousa.
De Sousa almost bled to death, but somehow survived. Through it all, she vowed that there was no time for tears.
When it comes to business, she claims she has the magic touch. A food lover, she says she has never failed in any business that she has started.
Her son Nicholas, Operations and Marketing Director, agrees.
“She might not have our degrees and all that but she can do everything that we do and she does it much better than we do. And I’ve met the likes of the Gordon Ramseys and Richard Bransons, but still, when I look at men like that, and I look at my mom I swear they’ve got nothing on her,” he says.
The next step is to make her business a world-wide brand. Surely, a woman who survived poverty, cheated death, negotiated loan sharks and loneliness would be odds on favorite to do anything.

Tag: Fish and Chips

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Fats Fishing For A Fortune

No Time For Tears When You’re Fishing For Dreams