'I quit my job with Google to follow my dreams'

An entrepreneur who quit his high-paying job with Google to build up his own food business said he only had £10 worth of ingredients when he started out.

Simmy Dhillon, 27, from Hitchin, Hertfordshire, said money was tight while growing up, with his father working in a factory and his mother doing shifts at a supermarket.

He said his childhood dream had been to make enough money to allow his parents to retire.

"The main motivator was seeing my parents struggle and not being in the same position as them as an adult," he said.

Mr Dhillon, co-founder of Hitchin-based Simmer Eats, was 19 and studying Economics at the University of Bristol when he started cooking and selling meals to his peers as a "side hustle".

Now that has evolved into a multimillion-pound business, delivering thousands of meals across the country daily.

Initially Mr Dhillon planned to become an investment banker.

"I thought it [the business] would help me get the best internships and graduate jobs, because they are going to see proactivity and initiative," he said.

After becoming the first person in his family to graduate, he landed a marketing job at Google that he quit to follow his passion.

Seven years after launching his business, he said his healthy ready meals had caught the attention of rapper Central Cee and Premier League footballer Alex Iwobi.

In 2024, he managed to complete his dream of funding his parents' retirement.

He said the achievement "has a very unique feeling, full of emotion and pride; you've spent your whole life trying to achieve something and then it finally happens".

Although he remained tight-lipped on how much money he had made through the business, he said it had made more than £10m in revenue.

Simmer Eats was ranked at 11 in the Sunday Times Hundred 2024, a list of Britain's fastest-growing companies, with annual sales growth of 184% over three years.

Mr Dhillon said it now had 15 full-time employees, including chefs who cooked the meals before they were delivered all over the UK.

"Where we are today is exceptional, but it has happened very slowly over seven years time and we've been working on it every single day," he said.

"If I stayed at Google and did the best work possible, I still wouldn't be anywhere near where I am now."

"We've sold over a million meals in the last 12 months."

Mr Dhillon co-founded the business with his older brother Jhai, 29, a former professional footballer who quit his job as an accountant with Ernst and Young to work for it.

Mr Dhillon said the pair grew up learning to be frugal.

"Dad said, 'You have to work hard so you don't end up with a bad job like me.' That's what he would say to us from a very young age.

"I didn't want to let my parents down by having all of the opportunities they didn't have, but ending up in the same situation.

"They said 'We're doing blue collar jobs so you can have stability and have the opportunities that we didn't have.'"

During a university summer holiday, he had an internship at an investment bank and said the people round him were earning "silly money".

"The lowest-paid people were on £50,000 a year which was more than both of my parents' salaries combined," he said.

He said his own earnings of £5,000 a month then "felt like a huge amount of money to me" but he wanted to put it all into his business.

"I was always really frugal. I asked a friend in London if I could crash on his couch but the couch was too small, so I slept on the [kitchen] floor on a little blow-up mattress," he said.

"[Living like that] wasn't fun but it just made me appreciate a comfortable bed more and it made me realise that you don't have to have a lot - you can survive, and people live in much worse conditions."

Now Mr Dhillon wants his firm to become a household name in the UK.

"I want to build a legacy," he said.

Source: BBC