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Sarah Willingham is a well-known British businesswoman. The British public knows her best from her work on BBC reality shows including Dragons’ Den and The Restraunt, as well as her work running profitable enterprises in the hospitality industry. Willingham was born in 1972 in Newcastle Under Lyme, Staffordshire, and is a bit of a local legend in the Midlands. This makes her the perfect person for Midlands Business News to write about. Especially as she is a role model for young businesspeople in the area.
The Beginning
Sarah Willingham started out with very little and worked her way up to management jobs at well-known franchise restaurants like Pizza Express and Planet Hollywood. These may not have been the most glamorous jobs to start with, but I’m sure they gave Ms. Willingham tremendous experience in the hospitality industry and taught her important skills that she used in future ventures (more on those later).
The Clapham House and the Bombay Bicycle Club
In 2004, she worked with The Clapham House Group to buy The Bombay Bicycle Club, which grew into the UK’s biggest Indian restaurant franchise. In 2007, she sold her stock back to the firm but stayed on as a primary board director, in charge of three of their four brands: Tootsies, The Real Greek, and The Bombay Bicycle Club. She was in charge of more than 50 restaurants and more than 1,500 staff.
Neutrahealth Willingham was quite busy in 2004 because she also started the Nurtian brand Neutrahealth. Nurtahealth was a public company on the AIM stock exchange. It bought six other firms in the health and supplement market before being sold to Elder Pharmaceuticals, a big company in the same field, in 2011.
Starting Nightcap
In 2020, Wellingham started Nightcap. The company has bought and built a number of hospitality brands during the past five years. The business’s main goal is to let people interact with each other through fun social events including creative drinks, live music, big parties, casual get-togethers, or vibrant late-night settings.
Willingham herself said that Nightcap bought the Brighton i360 viewing tower for £150,000 in February 2025. According to a Nightcap spokesman, the tower needed an extra £400,000 to fix the pod’s operation when it closed suddenly in December 2024 after going into administration in November. The BBC published this after The Argus’ first reporting. Brighton & Hove City Council paid off £51 million in debt in January 2025 so that the transaction could go through.
Cocktails and Dreams
She helped start a private equity platform in the UK in April 2008. We looked for further information about this, but sadly, there isn’t much out there. In 2010, nevertheless, she put money into the London Cocktail Club, which she learnt about via being on the hit TV show The Restaurant. The club launched its first bar on Goodge Street in London in 2011. In February 2012, the chain opened a second pub on Shaftesbury Avenue, and in 2013, it opened a third pub on Great Portland Street. It seems that her capacity to handle profitable hospitality businesses is the most important part of her profile.
TV Career
Sarah Willingham was a judge and investor on BBC2’s The Restaurant from 2006 to 2008. She became well-known for her no-nonsense style over the course of three seasons. During the third season of the show, she co-founded and invested in The London Cocktail Club, which we talked about earlier in this article. This helped it grow into one of the UK’s fastest-growing chains of cocktail bars.
Being on Dragon’s Den and Making Money
Sarah joined BBC2’s Dragon’s Den as a Dragon in 2015 and stayed on for two seasons. She was the first Dragon to have four kids under nine years old, and she stressed the need of both mentorship and money. She focused on putting money into businesses run by people she really trusted. In 2018, she left Sublime Science and made five times her money back. This was one of the best exits in the show’s history.
Finding a Balance Between Work and Family
Sarah Willingham left Dragons’ Den to focus on her family life, which is very important to her. She is a mother of four and combines her business with her work as a consumer champion. She often gives financial advise and business tips on TV and in the media. She started Letssavemoney.com, a free financial guidance site that helped hundreds of thousands of people before it closed in 2018 because she had to focus on her family and didn’t have enough staff to run it.
What to Look Forward To
Sarah has been doing great things in business since she burst onto the market in 2005, and she has built up quite a portfolio. As a Midlands-based business news organisation, we will be keeping a close eye on the rest of her career and are keen to see what she does next.
