‘Mum still thinks I am going to run out of money’

It is a winter’s Wednesday in suburban Highett, and I am due to meet a multimillionaire hippie wellness entrepreneur at a local restaurant the internet says is closed.

Radek Sali, school joker turned Village cinema manager turned Swisse vitamin company chief executive turned wellness entrepreneur, already feels like a likeable guy – even though we have never met.

Radek Sali at The Hellenic House Project in Highett.Credit: Simon Schluter

That’s because he tells readers on the opening page of his new book How to Build a Billion-Dollar Business (written with Bernadette Schwerdt) that most of them won’t succeed because they aren’t cut out to do it.

The Hellenic House Project is a standout in the suburban atmosphere of Highett. Inside a man in a blazer with a Patagonia backpack slung over one shoulder and hair in a topknot greets staff like old acquaintances (as they indeed are). It can only be he.

Sali turns to me, his eyes twinkling, and flashes his multimillion-dollar smile (worth $250 million when in 2015 Swisse Wellness sold to a Chinese company for $1.7 billion, even more now that he runs his own purpose-driven investment group Light Warrior).

We are ushered upstairs to a very Greek room, all blue and white with evil eye charms as wall decals.

Then it clicks into place. The Hellenic House Project, the comeback bid of shamed TV chef George Calombaris, is indeed closed for lunch. But it is open today – especially for us.

But what are we doing here? Sali was a major investor in Calombaris’ Made Establishment hospitality group until an underpayment scandal cost millions to fix and hit everyone’s reputations. The group shut down for that and other reasons, and hundreds lost their jobs.

Before going there, I start with a very Radek Sali question: How are you?

“I’m not good,” he starts. (Hold on – is this a scoop?) Then he continues, with a charming laugh: “I’m going fantastic!”

Sali engagingly explains his modus operandi is positive language because it can help people. His book is a great read, telling how his Czech mother Hana fled communism and his Albanian father Avni became a doctor, plus how-to-succeed-in-business tips and a coming-of-age story when cinema was central to the culture – Wog Boy filmmaker Nick Giannopoulos would visit and complain his film posters were badly displayed.

I’m keen – thanks to an extraordinary passage in his book – to ask about his mother, but it’s too soon. However, I am in no way prepared for the question he has for me at the tail end of lunch – so stunningly personal I have never asked it in nearly 30 years of journalism.

Sali is not drinking, but relents when he clocks my face and orders two glasses of Hellenic House prosecco from the Riverland. He seems a people pleaser.

The menu comes with its own glossary of Greek food terms. We start with the dishes I have loved since my tiny 11-year-old mind was inspired by Greek tastes and history on a family holiday. Tzatziki, the famous cucumber yoghurt, arrives heaped in bowls next to kingfish, avocado, pickled daikon and rice crackers deconstructed. And then there’s the gorgeous salty taramasalata (salted fish eggs) meze served with vinegar zucchini chips.

Calombaris is away in Europe, but his mum has made the Greek biscuits we later enjoy with coffee. Sali explains why he is still supporting him.

“Whilst my journey with George was a challenging time for me – it was the one business that fell over – you learn most from failure and you get better as a result of that.”

Kingfish tzatziki at The Hellenic House Project.Credit: Simon Schluter

Restaurant group Made Establishment closed in 2020 after it made a large contrition payment to the Fair Work Ombudsman. Underpayments to staff had totalled more than $7 million.

“We’re not partners in any business,” Sali says. “OK [we are] great friends. Yeah. And so supporting a great friend.”

People might find it hard to remain friends after losing so much money, but Sali gives a soft chuckle, as if he is acknowledging the point of view while dismissing it.

“George is such a generous soul that if you know him and understand where he comes from, he gives his all. I stick by people through difficult times. As much as I hope [they would do] the same for me.”

As a multimillionaire investor with a focus on wellness, Sali divides his time between his family home in Brunswick Heads, near Byron Bay in northern NSW, with wife Helen and five-year-old daughter Elodie, and their Collingwood apartment when he is down here on business. “I love the grittiness, diversity, the culture. It is just rich with thoughts and stories and interesting people.”

Sali saw Australia suffer during the COVID lockdowns and thinks our cost-of-living crisis is actually a cost-of-COVID crisis, with a lot of net effects from that time rebadged.

“We stopped the world and this country stopped for two years really, particularly Victoria,” he says.

We need to resolve the trauma of that, he says. The Voice vote was an attempt that failed, partly because of other traumas banked up.

“I think that there needs to be some kind of reconciliation, like a royal commission, that talks about why and what happened.”

He sees the lockdown impacts everywhere, in crises in housing and immigration and foreign students, but closer to home in teenage eating disorders, anxiety, even in the shyness of his daughter and her friends.

“We stopped the system and we’re not really talking about the endemic issues. You can’t decode everyone’s kind of trauma and support them with it. Instead, we need to allow everyone to unpack and then help each other go forward.”

For a while Sali was super-engaged, president of Food and Wine Victoria and on the board of Hawthorn Football Club. The 24/7 nature of Swisse took its toll on his mental health and now he does things differently. “I worked out I’m pretty good at a couple of things and going any further than that is really stretching me. And so those couple of things are impact investment and wellness.”

A tag on Sali’s Patagonia backpack is for Necker Island, global entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson’s private island in the British Virgin Islands. The pair were once business partners, in Makepeace Island, a Queensland luxury resort, and are still friends.

“He is beautifully awkward,” Sali says of the founder of the Virgin brand, “He’s very authentic. He’s very interested in lessons – you wouldn’t think that from his kind of brash PR. He really cares about impact and doing things that are right and using his influence for good in the world.”

Swisse and Sali made a fortune from trade with China. His Swisse experience taught him that Chinese consumers have an affinity with Australian products and lifestyle “and what we stand for”. “So I think that not having that kind of soft form of diplomacy where we are connecting at a business level is a really big mistake,” he says.

The signature dish arrives – slow-cooked lamb shoulder for two with tzatziki on the side. It is an enormous mound of a thing, with a carving knife stuck in the middle of its glazed skin. Chips with feta and wild greens complete the ideal winter meal.

The conversation flows. At one point in the book Sali talks about a huge stand-up argument he has with Chemist Warehouse over a contract, but it doesn’t faze him because, well, growing up with his mother.

Slow-cooked lamb shoulder. Credit: Simon Schluter

Sali’s mother was a teenager studying in London when the Prague Spring happened and in the aftermath, when communists suppressed the mass protests and stopped the liberalisation, she was treated as a criminal and not allowed back home.

“She was like a hard-nosed 1980s coach Ron Barassi-style, who was always motivating, always demanding the most from me, and got the best out of me. Most of the time, not always.

“But it set me up with a level of resilience and sense of what’s black and white, in terms of what was right or wrong … and bringing your best or don’t bother otherwise.”

Lunch with Radek Sali at The Hellenic House Project.

After talking about toughness, he pivots. “I could understand my mother’s fragility, so I knew it was coming from a place of love.

“So we had a deep bond. And she just wanted to make sure I made the most of the opportunities I’d been given. Mum still thinks I’m going to run out of money – she absolutely still thinks one day she’s going to have to come to rescue me.”

The book recounts a painful moment which led to Helen leaving her job at Swisse as a marketing executive at the behest of another executive.

You’re very forgiving, I comment. Carrying a grudge is just not his scene. “That part where you can’t get over someone. Just feeling that your whole body is reacting negatively – I just don’t think I need to carry that.”

The book also recounts several battles with the TGA regulator over the marketing slogans for vitamins (the company won, but then lost a later case) and media allegations against his dad over research on a product. The book recounts the media scandal that ensued and how his father settled a defamation case against the ABC. He comes back to Calombaris and recounts how he unfairly became the figurehead for the underpayment scandal while other culpable figures with their own underpayment scandals got away scot-free.

“George was the national discourse for a couple of weeks. It didn’t go away for a long time. We didn’t see the Woolies CEO or board members attacked like that, or the ABC’s lead team attacked for not getting [staff] their wages.”

The lunch is nearly over, the tape recorder is off and we are chatting, not strictly as interviewer and interviewee. I am talking about myself more than I usually do when I become aware Sali is watching me and working out if he will ask something.

I am talking about my life and my partner when he just comes out and says it.

“Will you stay together?”

Stunned, but not offended, I answer yes. But I don’t ask him in return.

A moment of professional failure? I don’t know if he would have answered. Earlier I had told him his book, like himself, is generous and helpful and willing, but only up to a point, beyond which is an unknowable private core.

He thinks and eventually comes the explanation: “It is probably not relevant to someone who is trying to build a great business.”