AN ENTREPRENEUR whose outdoor ovens are used by the likes of Richard Branson, Gordon Ramsay and Paul Hollywood is seeing rapid growth after taking his business to the US.

Tom Gozney is the founder of Gozney Limited, which went from making commercial ovens to producing portable pizza ovens that people could use in their gardens.

Its latest product, the Gozney Dome, recently went on sale in the UK. Retailing for £1,199, it was an instant success at its US launch, with eight million dollars of sales online in five hours.

Mr Gozney, 37, is now dividing his time between Lymington, Los Angeles and the company’s US base in the mountains of Park City, Utah.

The business has nearly 60 staff, around 45 of them at its base in Christchurch Business Park and the rest in the rapidly-expanding operation in the States.

It is quite an achievement for a businessman who was thrown out of Walhampton and Ballard schools in the New Forest, as well as Bournemouth and Poole College and the Arts Institute, and who has been honest about his problems with drink and drugs when he was younger.

Building the business and his products is “the most addictive process I’ve ever been on in my life”, he says.

Gozney Professional Ovens has been supplying the hospitality industry since 2010. In 2016, it was followed by Roccbox, a portable oven that can bake pizzas and bread, caramelise vegetables, roast meat and cook fish.

The company has sold “probably a couple of hundred thousand” Roccbox ovens and is budgeting for 50,000 this year.

“We were the first ever people to build a stone portable oven and now if you go online there’s probably 100 people selling them now,” he added.

The business has done “a lot of growing up” while developing its US operation and preparing the Dome.

“Just to nail that one single market could turn the business into a huge company, so we onboarded some non-executive directors just shy of two years ago that had unbelievable experience of growing very big businesses,” he said.

Those directors had previously led the expansion of headphone brand Skull Candy from 500,000 US dollars in sales to a 400million dollar launch on the stock market.

The launch of the Dome, he says, is a “step change” for the business.

“That singular product in its aesthetic, its function, it’s a category-building product again and so now we’re on a journey where we’re the only people in the market with a product that’s really shaping a new category for really versatile, live fire cooking with a product that’s so thoughtfully designed,” he said.

He says he never expected the business to get this big.

“It's been a wild ride and I honestly feel like I started because I didn’t really want to work for anyone else,” he said.

“I came out of rehab, a huge amount of drive and ambition in me. I didn’t know where to put that drive and ambition because I didn’t really know what I was good at.

“I started the business with a simple ethos that I loved live fire cooking, I loved cooking with wood fires and making incredible food for my friends and family and then it became a business that just gave me purpose and focus and a lifestyle of recovery that just made me sprint in a direction.

“Drinking and drug-taking just wasn’t even a consideration for me. That’s what the business gave me. I feel super-blessed to have had that.

“I’ve sort of learned that actually I’m a really good product innovator, I love brand, I love consumers, I love meeting people, I love having a positive impact on people’s lives through the products that we design.

“So there was this whole host of different ingredients that went into this big cocktail of passion for me, which really sort of gives me the energy and makes me dive out of bed in the morning.

“I never had a plan to start a business that would get to the stage that it’s got to now and even now the business is going to far exceed my expectations in the next three to five years.”

He added: “I feel privileged and honoured to be able to create jobs, to be able to employ people, to allow people to get mortgages, to have hundreds of thousands of ovens in homes creating happiness all round the world. That’s awesome for me. It’s like legacy stuff.”