There is definitely something winning about Sinclair’s quirky mixture of bottom-line business nous and old-fashioned charm. He’s virtually teetotal but “can’t resist ice cream”. He writes with a fountain pen. When he gives a presentation, he uses flip charts because he doesn’t trust PowerPoint ? and yet he is accompanied everywhere by his own whizzy videographer, Chudds, who does his online content, social media and produces his YouTube channel and podcasts.
At Rossi’s, Sinclair is trying to feed me some of his whizzy new ice-cream flavours ? gin and tonic, vegan strawberry ? before he swoops over with a cloth and cleaner to quickly clear a table and shoot the breeze with a few of the elderly regulars. Smiles all round. To be clear; most multi-millionaires do not wipe down the fixtures and fittings. But then Sinclair is not your average multi-millionaire.?
Dapper in chinos, he stands at an impressive 6ft 2in, or he would do if he weren’t hunched over after 20 years of bending down to entertain small children with magic. He has four hours of personal training a week but his posture is still an issue.
“I was still gigging almost full-time up until three years ago,” he tells me. “The business was growing so fast that I needed to roll up my sleeves and keep grafting. I enjoy the challenges of business but I also love entertaining people, being on stage, making them laugh.”
His Brentford backstory is a classic tale of entrepreneurial ingenuity. “Growing up, my mum had MS, and so after she was confined to a wheelchair, I lived with my dad and my stepmum,” he says. “My mum died when I was 17; back then there were far fewer treatments for MS.” When I suggest his zeal for entertaining might stem from childhood sadness, he’s nonplussed; like a great many self-starters, he has neither the interest in nor bandwidth for psychoanalysis. His focus is on the present, not the past.
It was a blended family and he had three much younger sisters. Although Sinclair only ever had one birthday party ? it was held at a Wimpy and he vividly remembers every blissful moment of it ? when a professional party entertainer was drafted in to perform at the fifth birthday party of one of his younger siblings, he had his lightbulb moment, aged 15.
“The guy was charging £100 and I was watching him thinking I could definitely do better than that.” And so Jimbo the Partyman was born. By the time he left school at 16, he was already a full-time party magician, pulling in anything between £500 and £1,000 a week, taking bookings over a year in advance ? while operating from his nan’s spare room.
Aged 18, he employed his first member of staff (who also operated out of his nan’s spare room) and then invested in his first property. He bought one every year for four years, then remortgaged them to buy a play centre in Basildon.
“I got £150,000 from the TSB and the rest from 21 different people, who weren’t technically loan sharks but charged similar rates of interest. I did what I needed to do and here we are; I may have left school at 16 but I’ve learned so much from reading autobiographies of successful entrepreneurs.”