Jamie Oliver 'mixed business with pleasure' and it's lost him $150 million.

If there’s one thing all successful business-y type people agree on – it’s that you should never, ever mix business with pleasure.

Jamie Oliver, everyone’s favourite celebrity chef, has just learnt that lesson the hard way.

Oliver revealed that he’s lost $150 million over the last three years because he hired family members and friends to work with him in his restaurant/cookbook/TV show empire.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Oliver admitted that while he “may have made money” in the last few years, he is down $150 million since his popularity peaked in 2014.

Oliver partly blames his money woes on that “30 to 40 bit” of his life where he didn’t plan for his financial future well.

“I basically squirrelled nothing away, I built no safety and I had a slightly weird view of the recession,” he said.

But the 42-year-old also revealed that he now has “lists of friends that I shouldn’t have collaborated with” and acknowledges you should “never mix business and pleasure”.

We first saw Oliver in 1999 when the BBC debuted his TV show The Naked Chef. The celebrity chef now has 48 restaurants in the UK alone and 19 books printed in 36 languages worldwide.

I Love this little ball of joy…..a little calm time with dad on our summer hols with a little help from a good old Thumb ????????????????????good times, I miss my thumb big love guys jamie x x x

A post shared by Jamie Oliver (@jamieoliver) on Jul 23, 2017 at 12:50pm PDT

“If you’re 30 and you’ve got a talent you’ve got to smash it and that’s what we did – we created 8500 jobs and we tried anything that would get anybody cooking. We put good heart and soul in it,” he told The Telegraph.

In the interview, the dad-of-five also said the secret of the success of his marriage to wife Jools was keeping “work really separate” from family life.

“You probably know more about what I’m doing than she does,” he says. “You’ve just got to make stuff work, although we definitely don’t have enough time for just us.”

But he has no plans to slow down – he’s just released another book and TV show in the UK, and he plans to continue educating his followers about the benefits of healthy eating.

“I’m pretty clear I don’t want it to be the same as the last ten years. Do I take my kids to school every day and retire? I’m not going to do that. I will still try to push boundaries and I want to be much more medical, educational and political, but in a really grown up way.”

Janine Allis: mother-of-four and accidental entrepreneur.