Born and bought up in South Africa, where his father was an expatriate banker, Sanger moved to England at 10. After boarding school and university he joined a large accountancy firm as a trainee, but after three years narrowly failed his exams and left without qualifying.
He said: “I hated it. The whole experience knocked my confidence and led to a lot of soul-searching.”
Sanger enrolled at horticultural college and got a place at law school but in the end took up neither and got a job with an advertising agency instead. After two years, however, he realised that this did not suit him either.
He said: “I got fed up with the endless meetings. The final straw came when six people spent several days trying to choose the background colour for a poster.”
He finally decided the solution was to start his own business. So in 1991, at the age of 25, he left to open a chain of sandwich bars.
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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 that made him laugh.
But with no experience of the food industry, Sanger was soon struggling. He was working from 5am to 9pm six days a week, but the shop was losing money. After three months he reached crisis point.
He said: “I knew I had either to throw in the towel and go back to being an employee — or find a way of making it work.”
He decided the answer was to find some wholesale customers. So he hired a manager to run the shop and 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 eight Rollover sandwich bars.
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He was in Copenhagen for the weekend with his Danish girlfriend when he bought a hot dog from a street stall and realised that many other people were doing the same.
He said: “They were delicious and I wondered why I would never eat one in Britain. I realised it was because at home there was a perception that hot dogs were a poor-quality product and a food for children. I decided that this was the thing for me.”
Even better, unlike the hot dogs he had eaten in England, these were made with a special machine that inserted the sausage right inside the bread roll so that it was completely enclosed, making it easy to hold.
Sanger spent the rest of the weekend quizzing street sellers about their hot dogs and ended up buying a machine from one of them for £500.
When he got it home he asked a British manufacturer to modify the machine so customers could see what was going on inside. Then he installed it in one of his shops to use with high-quality sausages imported from Germany. Sales went so well that he asked the manufacturer to make seven more machines to put in all his shops.
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The name came by accident. He said: “We used to wrap our hot dogs in 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.”
Then one day the landlady of his local pub asked Sanger if she could borrow a machine to make hot dogs for customers watching a rugby international. She sold out before the match started. Two weeks later the pub’s area manager called to see if he could hire six machines. 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 sandwich bars for £350,000 to concentrate on expanding the hot-dog business.
But then he made a big mistake. He decided to open hotdog retail outlets. The first three did well so he went on a high-speed opening spree with £750,000 he had borrowed from the bank.
He said: “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.”
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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. By the time it was over he had lost £1m.
He said: “It was a huge learning curve. I learnt that you have to focus on the whole picture, not just on the bit that you want to see. The failure was not in trying retail, but in doing it too quickly and not stopping to analyse whether it was the right course of action.”
Fortunately, the wholesaling operation survived. Rollover now sells 25m hot dogs a year and supplies most Premiership football clubs, theme parks and concert halls in the country.
Sanger, 39, who owns 90% of the company, expects sales of £7m this year and £11m in 2005, which should lead to a net profit of £1m.
He said: “It has definitely been worth it. It is not making money that has inspired me; it is wanting to be the biggest and best. I am enormously proud of what I have achieved.”
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