Pret A Manger CEO: From a 16-year-old McDonald’s worker to earning $5 million

It’s there that he “fell in love with hospitality,” he tells Fortune. But at the time, he had no idea his love affair with the industry would propel him from taking Happy Meal orders to leading one of Britain’s biggest sandwich chains, Pret A Manger. 

Like most teenagers, Christou just wanted to earn money “to buy things”. 

“My parents didn’t have lots of lots of money. But what they did have was a phenomenal work ethic,” he recalls. His half-Greek, half-Italian father was a mini-cab driver and his Greek-Cypriot mother was a nurse.

“I knew the more I worked, the more money I could make,” he says.  

Christou wasn’t wrong. By the age of 18, he had dropped out of school and was on track to have an impressive career in management at McDonald’s. He then scaled Pret’s ranks at an impressive pace to the coveted CEO role, where last year he took home a $490,000 salary plus a $4.5 million share bonus.

Christou now oversees Pret A Manger’s 550-plus stores across Britain, Hong Kong, Dubai, and the United States, after two decades and 10 promotions at the company.

“Obviously today, people move from job to job a lot more swiftly than maybe 10 to 20 years ago,” he says.

“I’m in a very different situation now—but I don’t forget that £2.75 ($3.40) an hour was the starting point of my career.” 

Christou’s résumé recently went viral on social media because, as one user wrote on X, it’s “so, so rare to see” someone climb the corporate ladder from the very bottom to the very top.

“I feel thankful for the opportunities I had along the way,” Christou tells Fortune—but don’t call him lucky.

“I think there’s luck along the way but overall, if you work hard and you are very intentional, you can achieve things,” he says. “I am a big believer in you make your own luck.“

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