For someone who fronts a television programme called Risking It All, Martin Webb comes across as remarkably relaxed. Dressed casually in jeans and a shirt, it's difficult to imagine him being based in a big city or indeed anywhere other than his native Brighton, where his family have lived for generations and where he's even on first name terms with the local café owner.

Webb has good reason to be relaxed. The two pub companies he co-owns on the back on the sale of his Brighton nightclub company C-side in 2001 - The Medicine Group and WSD Bars - are expanding rapidly, his Brighton art gallery Dekorart, where we stage the photoshoot, is having to turn away work and he hopes the outdoor activity centre he is developing in France will be open in 18 months. He may not be as filthy rich as some entrepreneurs - yet - but the Webb empire is progressing nicely.

But none of these ventures take up much of Webb's time these days. His main concern for the past two years has been Risking It All, the Channel 4 show trailing would-be entrepreneurs setting up firms across the country and in all walks of life that is currently filming its third series.

"I think the reason they went for me is because I'm not too scary," he says. "I've been quite successful but I don't have hundreds of millions of pounds like Richard Branson. I'm still in the same playing field as they hope to be in and one thing I can do relatively well is to talk to people in a common sense way."

Over the last couple of years, Webb's adventures on Risking It All have taken him to businesses ranging from an urban spa in Bath to a healthy burger bar in London and a hotel in North Wales as he attempts to instil a bit of business knowledge into people who lack even the most basic experience.

"The really big divide between where most businesses fail or succeed is people's experience," says Webb. "You can't be a successful entrepreneur if you have no experience because you'll get eaten alive.

"We had one guy setting up a pizza restaurant in Widnes and he'd never run a restaurant before," he says. "One of the first bits of advice I gave him was to go and work for a few days in a successful pizza restaurant because he would have learned far more in that couple of days than he would cocking up in the first two weeks of running his own business."

Webb believes the current deluge of television programmes featuring people trying to run a business is a positive move, as long as television companies portray the negative sides as well as the positive. "It can't be glamourised," he explains. "These programmes have a responsibility to show both sides because running a business can damage your health, your relationships and if it goes wrong you can end up bankrupt with no money and no house.

"The worst reason people go into running a business is to escape from something they're already doing," he says. "They don't like working for their boss and they don't like the nine-to-five. You should go into business because you really love something, not because you don't like something else. It should be pulling you rather than pushing you."

The fortunes of the entrepreneurs featured in the series have varied immensely, with many ideas seemingly doomed from the start and some people unable to cope with the pressures that come with running your own business.

"There were a couple that were completely doomed and there may even be the odd one that doesn't make it to the screen," he admits. "But the most successful one was a couple of lads in Sheffield running a hairdressing salon called Loaf. One of them had no experience - he'd been a carpet fitter all his life - and the other one had been a hairdresser who was working for somebody else.

"But they just had such a good attitude and such a positive belief that nothing would go wrong and they're now taking about £5,000 to 6,000 a week and are about to open their second salon."

Déja vu
But the biggest issues facing entrepreneurs are the same as they have always been. "The first is the physical leap of faith to actually leave what you're doing," suggests Webb. "You've got to summon immense self-confidence from somewhere and that was the same for me because I did have the option of just getting a normal job.

"Secondly, it's finance. It strikes me in every single case just how tight money is for people and how incredibly difficult it is - particularly for those with families - to actually find the money to start a business. Those things were true when I started and they're true today as well, particularly the financial pressure."

On the back of the series, Webb has written the Risking It All book, a practical no-nonsense guide to setting up a business that draws on lessons learned by the individuals featured in the television series and which goes out of its way to challenge the conventional wisdom as preached in business schools.

"I'm surprised you don't get one-month practical entrepreneurial courses where you go along and study eight-to-five on how to negotiate or market," he remarks. "But not how the business schools do it: more from an extremely practical hands-on small business point of view.

"You see people making the most basic mistakes," he continues. "Salespeople come along and become their mates. They should know not to fall for that. You can have the best intentions in the world but if you don't have experience it's going to cost you."

Webb certainly gained his own experience the hard way. Just two years after leaving Brighton University, where he ran a series of club nights as a DJ and graduated with a business studies degree, Webb set up his own bar in Brighton called Helsinki with his business partner Simon Kirby. But while it was always busy - "we couldn't have got any more people through the door if we wanted to" - the money was going out faster than it was coming in.

"We were just living the high life really with absolutely no concern for the future whatsoever," he recalls. "It just seemed the most natural thing in the world to go and buy an old Porsche 911. We knew how to make a bar busy but we didn't know what to do with that money once it was in the bank and we spent it all. If we had the experience we've got now it would have worked very well."

But after 18 months of "quite serious soul-searching" once the business had finally gone under, Webb and Kirby decided to give it another go. "I'd gone from this high profile young man running this trendy bar in town to back working again, without any money and the cars had gone," says Webb. "There was a huge realisation that we'd done things wrong but there was also a massive realisation that we could do this. We were doing it much better than the other guys around town."

Beside the C-side
So in 1993 the Webb-Kirby bar empire was reborn, on a budget of £5,000 and funded by a combination of Webb's DJ-ing and money from credit cards. Within eight years, the company grew from one bar to 28 leisure outlets including the Zap Bar, the Funky Buddha lounge club and the Beach Club on Brighton seafront, as Webb and Kirby followed an aggressive rollout programme, gambling the success of the whole venture with every move.

"It was almost like the money you have on the gambling table: the pile of chips you have from the roulette wheel. It's probably not the best advice to give to other entrepreneurs but if you want to make money quickly you have to take risks, there's no other way of doing it."

And by the time Webb and Kirby decided to cash in their chips, their gamble had paid off. They sold Webb-Kirby in 2001 for £15 million - changing the name to C-side in the process to help prepare the company for sale - when the company was turning over £23 million a year and generating an annual profit of £2.3 million.

After eight years in the nightclub trade, an exhausted Webb took a career break, during which he sailed round the Caribbean and across the Atlantic, walked the Inca Trail and learned to speak French before returning to the UK to set up People's Pubs, which runs the Robin Hood pub in Brighton and gives all its net profit to good causes in or around the Brighton area.

"I had a few million pounds in the bank and it was a genuine feeling that I was in a position of responsibility and that I could do something positive for the place I lived in," he says. "Everything happens in a pub: deals are done, people meet, discuss ideas, flirt, get married, whatever. Pubs are for people and about people so we decided to use that as a focal point to put something back into the community."

The pub opened in 2004 and last year it gave away £50,000. "It's all about trying to help real people in our communities, so we don't help animal, political or environmental charities," Webb explains. "Recently we gave away £5,000 to a woman's refuge, a homeless group, a school and a place where kids who are in abusive relationships can go and meet other kids. We use the idea that it's a perfect excuse to have another drink. I hear that all the time in the pub: ‘let's have one more, it's for charity'."

The big one
Webb claims he is a much more relaxed character these days than he was a few years ago. "I probably worked too hard for a 10-year period," he says. "From my mid-20s to mid-30s I just worked all the time at the expense of relationships and friendships, so if I had my time again I would probably take my foot off the brake a little bit.

"I'm 41-years-old and I had a realisation at the age of 40 that you don't live forever and I want to try and pack as much stuff in as possible," he explains. "So I'm into horse riding and sailing, I'm taking flying lessons and I've recently had a small baby."

But despite his new persona, Webb is itching to get involved with another project. "My head is packed full of ideas and things I've learned from my own businesses and from Risking It All, and I feel I'm perfectly poised now to set something up," he says.

"I'm not totally sure what it is yet but I still feel everything I've done up to now is just a learning process for what I'm going to do for the next 10 years. There's going to be a big idea in the next 12 to 18 months."

The fortunes he's amassed over the years means he's unlikely to be risking it all in the manner of some of the programme's participants but Webb is slowly but surely heading back to that roulette wheel once again. This time, though, you get the feeling whatever business he launches will far less of a gamble than his first pub he launched all those years ago.

From bars to Barbados, and back again
1964 Born in London (29/09)

1989 Set up Helsinki bar with business partner Simon Kirby

1992 Company folded

1993: Founded Webb-Kirby, which would later become C-side, on a budget of £5,000

1997: Bought the freehold on the Zap club after the previous owners continuously objected to the licence on the neighbouring premises The Beach Club, which was owned by Webb-Kirby. Webb describes this as his company's big break

1998: C-side featured in The Sunday Times Fast Track 100 list of fastest growing companies. The business then expanded at a rate of one site every six months

1999: Launched Brighton radio station Surf 107

2000: Became director of ‘Place to Be', the group behind Brighton's successful bid to become a city

Sold C-side for £15 million. The firm was then turning over £23 million a year and generating £2.3 million across 28 venues

2001: Went travelling for two years during which time he walked the Inca Trail in Peru, learned to skipper a yacht in Sydney, sailed his own yacht from Brighton to Barbados and learned to speak French

2002: Returned briefly to set up Project Safehouse: a five-bedroomed house that acts as a refuge for at-risk youngsters

2004: Set up People's Pubs, a pub chain that gives its entire profit to charity

Expanded two commercial pub companies - the Medicine Group and WSD Bars - in London. Sites include the Medicine Bar in Shoreditch and Islington

Launched a web-based fine art digital printing firm Dekorart based in Brighton

2005: Started training to become a pilot