’I was ready to give up’: How Grill’d boss Simon Crowe came back from the brink
Simon Crowe went into a dark place four years ago, drinking heavily and driving recklessly as revenues from his burger chain plunged 70 per cent. This is his story of survival.
Grill’d burger chain boss Simon Crowe politely bristles when asked about his wealth.
In addition to the $22m Toorak home he now lives in, he and his wife paid $5.9m last year for the property next door. Yet he claims to still be focused on a higher, more altruistic goal than money.
“If this was about money, I would have sold the business moons ago. It’s not about money,” he declares.
“It’s about passion. It’s about belief. It’s about actually the legacy of my mum and dad and doing something that I think contributes meaningfully to this incredible country.”
It is now more than four years on from the toughest moments of his life, and the entrepreneur is feeling better about the world.
In 2020, as his business was seemingly collapsing, Crowe was also battling shingles for the first time in his life. The painful rash caused by the chickenpox virus has a trademark blistering outbreak, sometimes on the face.
“I think my kids were my light. I think without them being there …” he says. “You know, recklessness is …”
There is a pause as he stares over my shoulder out the window, as tears momentarily well in his eyes. Memories of those dark times are still clearly raw.
“I don’t think I ever considered leaving this earth. But I certainly was in a place where I didn’t know where to go. My kids were wonderful,” he says.
“They knew something was up but they were incredible and very involved in my life. Their desire to be with Dad was probably the thing that gave me a ray of sunshine.
“I’ve prided myself on my resilience. I am emotional and I’ve got a drive inside of me, one that will get through anything. But at that point in time, I felt like I was ready to give up,” laments Crowe, who 20 years ago chose to pick a fight with some of the biggest fast food-chains in the world.
“It was the belief that what I’d been doing for nearly 15 years was about to collapse completely. I felt like we were on death row.”
A damaging media investigation had fundamentally challenged his ethics and integrity as a businessman and then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, slashing Grill’d’s revenues by 70 per cent. Like most business owners, he thought he was going to lose everything.
Before the pandemic his company refused to work with third-party home delivery services like Uber Eats. So when Covid-19 hit, it had no choice but to turn to every possible survival option.
“I went into my own dark place and was very confused about where to go. I was drinking too much and I was driving recklessly. I was in a bad state upon reflection and I don’t think I knew that at the time,” Crowe says.
At the end of 2019 he took his family to Noosa for Christmas. His behaviour rung alarm bells for wife Sophie.
“I spent most of the time in bed and on the balcony, but I wasn’t engaging with her or the family. Sophie was very worried about me from a mental health perspective and upon reflection, she had a right to be. I was just lost,” he says.
But by March 2020 he was back in Grill’d’s Melbourne head office every day. As he puts it, there was “no other viable option”.
His now ex-chief executive, Adam Stapleton, and his team rallied around him and brought the business back from the brink.
As he reflects four years later upon the two decades since Grill’d started out as a single burger joint in suburban Hawthorn – claiming the group now turns over more than $500m – Crowe is resolute in his determination to continue at the helm of the firm he started.
Sporting a suave black velvet jacket and black jeans, he reveals the epiphany he had in mid 2021 when he took two months of long-service leave and travelled around Australia with his family.
Back then he asked himself a critical question: “Is this the path I want to walk for the next number of years or is this a boat to jump off?”
“We’ve had moments of revolution in our history. That time was, I guess, a resetting for me to say, ‘Okay, what am I doing?’
“My senior team asked me, ‘Is this a business you are going to sell? Where’s the pathway forward?’ But it became really obvious and I committed to them that I will be actively involved and the majority owner between now and when I turn 60.
“So that’s nine years from now.”
In March this year Grill’d convened for its 20 year anniversary staff conference, split between Melbourne and Luna Park; 550 people attended. The guest speakers included the commanding officer of the Salvation Army, Major Brendan Nottle.
Crowe outlined his goal to grow Grill’d from 170 to more than 300 restaurants by opening as many as 30 each year.
“We celebrate that we are in the quick service restaurant business, but not the dirty fast-food business,” he says.
“So we need to have the same points of difference going forward that we had from the outset. That’s about being local and being extraordinarily obsessed about product quality.”
Confronting reality and conquering demons
When I interviewed Crowe to mark Grill’d’s decade in business in 2015, the former Young Richlister seemingly had the world at his feet. It has been a tumultuous decade since then.
At the end of 2019 a series of reports by investigative journalist Adele Ferguson claimed Grill’d used a government-subsidised traineeship program to pay staff less.
Her articles claimed there was “constant pressure” on managers of Grill’d to keep wages down and that there were “serious food safety concerns” at one in 10 company owned Grill’d restaurants.
The stories claimed Grill’d franchisees believed they had been unfairly treated by the company.
The allegations were so serious that if Crowe had been a public company CEO he might never have survived. But at Grill’d, he is the only shareholder and his advisory board is hand picked.
When I ask how his critics might now reconcile Grill’d’s alleged bad behaviour with his purchase in October 2022 of his stunning Toorak home, for the first time during our discussion he looks noticeably riled.
“I don’t think we have done wrong. We definitively and categorically haven’t underpaid anyone based on the laws of Australia,” Crowe says, his eyes awkwardly fixing their gaze downwards at the table between us with a look of determination. Any moment you wonder if he will thump it. He doesn’t and continues.
“What we are is a brand that has a purpose and a mission, which is to liberate burgers from badness by giving permission to shop that category in a guilt free, healthy and progressive manner.
“We are about quality product and an experience that can’t be delivered elsewhere. So I challenge your notion of us being bad. I believe we are providing goodness to the category and goodness to communities.
“The people in our business are our greatest asset by a mile. You can’t run a restaurant business successfully without your frontline buying into and believing in what you do and what you stand for.”
He is also adamant food safety issues have been addressed.
But then, adopting a more reflective tone and after earlier claiming Ferguson’s attacks on him were “personal”, he reveals he has regrets about how he dealt with the crisis.
“If ever there’s been an attack on our business, I felt a desire to stand up and lean into that.
Upon reflection, I wish I had leaned into the situation more,” he says.
“If a journalist is writing about you then it should have been my responsibility to try and meet her face to face.
“Because I’ve got nothing to hide and I believe passionately in what we stand for and what we are trying to do. Because we are now a scaled organisation, I hope that means we are actually helping and contributing meaningfully to societies all around Australia.
“So if I believe all of that, then I’ve got to lean in and actually stand up to the line and I didn’t do it well enough. That’s happened twice now in our history and that disappoints me. Because I think that’s part of my mandate, part of my skill set.”
Grill’d also made headlines in 2016 for allegedly underpaying hundreds of young workers by hiring staff on compulsory traineeships and outdated employment agreements.
It has since updated all of its agreements, but in 2017 Crowe also lamented to me about not getting on the front foot fast enough.
Another distressing situation for Crowe came in 2016 when his business partner and friend, Geoff Bainbridge, initiated legal action accusing him of breaching his duties as a director, and of using company resources to fund the purchase of the chocolate brand Koko Black.
In a counter claim, Crowe sought an order forcing Bainbridge to sell his stake in Grill’d, claiming it was impossible for the pair to work together again.
The case was settled in mid 2017 when Bainbridge, then a 25 per cent shareholder in Grill’d, agreed to sell to Crowe for an undisclosed sum.
Separately in 2022 Bainbridge stepped down as CEO of the ASX-listed whiskey distiller Lark Distilling after he was exposed smoking a substance in an explicit video he claimed was being used to extort money from him.
So would Crowe ever consider taking on external investors again?
“One of my founding business partners is an amazing person who’s a great friend,” he says of Grill’d’s other foundation shareholder, Simon McNamara, who sold his 20 per cent stake to Crowe in 2012.
“We had a rocky time, but we are now wonderful mates. With the other one, I ended up in the Federal Court. So I am perhaps a little battle scarred relative to partnerships.”
But Crowe reveals he is open to taking on external capital for a longer-term move into America and to add another local brand to Grill’d’s portfolio.
Grill’d has a restaurant in Bali, its only one in Asia, but that is not where he sees the group’s international future.
“An Asian play isn’t the pathway of our future,” he says.
“The pathway for our future abroad is the US. We also want to have a new domestic brand in Australia across chicken, Mexican, or pizza.
“Now how do you do all these things with the right structure and the right systems? It would be ridiculous to get to that point 20 years down the track and then become capital challenged, putting the whole business into a state of challenge.
“So if the right partner gave us a growth pathway, then I’d consider that.”
Something worth relishing
As Grill’d embarks on its third decade in business, Crowe reveals it is developing an online booking system for its restaurants linked to its membership program, which is called Relish.
It has launched its first drive-through restaurant in Brisbane, while its first in its hometown of Melbourne will open in July near Chadstone Shopping Centre.
Of the next 50 restaurants Grill’d opens, half will have drive-through facilities.
In the next stage of growth Crowe also foresees Grill’d being not only a burger firm, but a property business as it purchases more sites across the country.
He also has a vision for the firm’s sustainability and philanthropy.
“We talk about sustainability being four things – our welfare, natural resources, our community and our people. The sustainability part that I get excited about is how we play into local communities,” he says.
An example is Grill’d’s partnership with Tasmanian firm Sea Forest, which is feeding cattle a native seaweed to reduce their methane emissions and produce a “low-carbon” burger.
But Crowe’s most immediate challenge is finding a CEO to replace Adam Stapleton so he can focus on strategy.
Now, more than four years on from his darkest days, the entrepreneur is in a far better place.
“I think Grill’d is my vehicle for making positive change so that we can actually be a better society,” he says.
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