How Sir Rocco Forte built another billion-pound company after losing the family business

Sir Rocco Forte succeeded his father as chief executive of the family business, Forte Group, in 1992. Forte Group was one of the biggest businesses in the UK at this point. It owned luxury hotels, Little Chef restaurants and Travelodge hotels.

But Sir Rocco’s tenure in charge didn’t work out as he envisaged. By 1996 he had lost the family business. Granada made a hostile £3.9bn takeover bid for Forte Group, won control and then dismantled the business. Sir Rocco walked away bruised but unbowed. “We have lost the bid, but I don’t believe we have lost the argument,” he said at the time.

30 years later, Sir Rocco has built another business worth more than £1 billion – Rocco Forte Hotels. Our podcast episode looks at the story of the Granada bid battle and how Sir Rocco bounced back.

Here are three key takeaways:

1. The importance of succession planning

Sir Rocco says that the transition to him becoming chief executive of Forte Group in place of his father could have been handled better. “I think if he’d retired a bit earlier I could have got things moving in the right direction sooner. Maybe the takeover bid wouldn’t have happened,” Sir Rocco says. “But on the other hand, he’s someone who’d worked all his life, built a business and it was very much part of his life- I wasn’t clever enough to keep him involved in some way.”

2. Being in the right place at the right time

Sir Rocco was struggling to find hotels for his new business when an opportunity to take over The Balmoral hotel in Edinburgh emerged. “There’s obviously a certain amount of opportunism,” he says. “When I started, I couldn’t do a deal, I couldn’t find a hotel to buy. Quite a few deals fell through. It was lucky that The Balmoral came along completely at the right time.”

3. The power of a partnership

At the centre of Rocco Forte Hotels is Sir Rocco and his sister Olga, who have built the business together. Olga is the director of design and handles what the hotels look like on the inside. “Obviously it’s got to look nice and it’s got to be well decorated,” Sir Rocco says of his hotels. “My sister Olga, who joined me from the beginning – rather reluctantly at first – understood that side of things very well.”