LEE FISH must have seemed a fairly reluctant student when he enrolled on an MBA at the University of Strathclyde.

“I hate learning, I hate books,” he says. “I like to do things, not read about them.”

Nonetheless, Fish, the master franchisee of O’Briens, a sandwich chain, in Scotland, regards his MBA as one of his most valuable business experiences. He studied law as a first degree, then decided to go into business. “I was always commercially minded. I wanted to buy and sell.” His first job was as a commercial finance manager at M&S, responsible for profit and loss, “making sure that stores were making money”.

Making money is Fish’s motivation and few could deny that he’s good at it. He became the youngest bank manager for Clydesdale at 24. “My talent was getting the best out of people and combining that with commercial acumen.” While with the National Australia Bank, which owns Clydesdale, he met two brothers who were franchisees for the Subway sandwich chain. “I saw them make an awful lot of money and it set me thinking.”

In his twenties, Fish quietly built up a portfolio of 15 buy-to-lets. “It gave me a taste for doing my own thing.” He moved to Prudential, the insurance firm, and enrolled on the executive MBA course in 2002 after noticing that most of the senior management team had postgraduate qualifications. “I thought, if these people are doing it there must be something in it.” He liked the practical approach. Rather than go in-depth into one business area, he chose to look at the relationships between different functions and sharpen his knowledge of finance.

He had also noticed that his wealthy clients all had something in common: they all owned their own businesses. “I was getting cheesed off with making money for other people,” he says. Yet, despite his entrepreneurial flair, he lacked the initial spark of an idea that would kick a start-up into life. “The problem was, I didn’t know what kind of business I wanted,” he says. “I hadn’t invented Velcro. I just wanted a business to run.” A defining moment came when he went to a franchise exhibition “to see if there were any ideas that I could rip off”.

Instead, he saw the potential of franchising. Most on offer were small-scale, or too aligned with head office, he says. O’Briens was a perfect fit – enough freedom to run stores himself, under the franchising name Fish Food, but with the security of a successful brand. He opened his first five stores in 2005. By the end of this year he intends to have ten, with a projected turnover of £3.5 million. His is the best performing O’Briens franchise in Scotland: the chain is bigger than Starbucks north of the Border.

Location is crucial when investing in new shops, he says. The MBA gave him the confidence to take risks that later paid off, by applying higher analysis gleaned from the course. “Before I did the MBA I was a bit impetuous. Retail is partly instinctive – you have to be able to say, ‘That will sell’. But logical decisions [give] things a better chance of success.” Techniques such as stress tests, used to determine how robust financial models are, proved invaluable, he says. He was advised not to open a shop on one site (“everyone said I was crazy”) but saw the potential that developments in the area would bring. The store is now the highest-earning O’Briens in Scotland.

Fish put his MBA on hold when the franchise took off and has yet to complete his final project. Although he has no plans to work for anyone else, he is keen to gain the qualification. “It’s a badge of pedigree, commercially and academically.”

Franchising requires business sense, but by drawing on others’ experience, the risks are far lower. “I knew nothing about sandwiches, [but] there is a lot of equity; other people spent 20 years making mistakes.” Fish Food was profitable from Day 1. “It’s the start of an empire,” he says.

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