So I have learnt how to teach people my values, how to develop a vision and have faith to let my team help me deliver it. And I have been very lucky in that people tend to work for me for a long, long time, so they know my level and what I’m looking for. They enjoy the structure and the freedom, which is an unusual combination but – as I have found – a winning one.
Of course, no man – or woman – is an island and you don’t operate in isolation throughout your career. However much you have perfected your mind-set, you have to navigate and grow within your working world. For most of my life, that has been football.
People are amazed when I say this, but I’m no great fan of the game. When we – David Sullivan, David Gold and I – bought Birmingham City Football Club in 1993, I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I love, love, love football, I have to get into it.’ But there were many things about the business that interested me. And that was why David Sullivan and I made a perfect combination. He loved the football, and I loved the business.
Because football is a unique business. We don’t manufacture anything at all. Instead, it’s about making the most of the brand and getting the best out of the people. And all your assets are people. Dealing with them correctly, getting the balance right between them, understanding who they are and their ambitions, setting a structure for success and making sure everybody is going in the same direction are the keys to running that sort of people business.
What I liked most was the connection with the customer, the ability to build a brand, which, in turn, builds value. There are very few businesses that have such a real, intimate relationship with their customers, and still fewer that come face to face with those hard-core customers every week. And football is unique in that the customer almost never changes his allegiance. It’s not as if an Aston Villa fan ever wakes up one morning and decides to support Birmingham, or an Arsenal supporter is strolling down the road and switches to Tottenham. When you’re in, you’re in, and I thought that was a really interesting concept. I wanted to explore just how far you could take the relationship.
And I do love brands. I love the idea of building loyalty and building the concept, and I could see the potential with a football club. When I got involved all those years ago, no one would have said a football club was a brand. At the start, there were lots of people who said they supported a club but who weren’t paying customers. They would sit at home, watch a match on TV and say, ‘I support Birmingham,’ but they wouldn’t express that support by buying a ticket, a programme, a shirt. I saw great potential in those people. I was convinced we could find a way to convert the passive supporter into a paying customer who would engage in the business of football.
I was right. Now it has all changed: everyone accepts that the crest means something special. In fact, by the time I left Birmingham you could have a Birmingham City credit card, a Birmingham City mobile phone and you could travel with the Birmingham City travel club. We even had a Birmingham City funeral service (which one or two of my managers were threatened with over the years!). My point is that over the years the brand had been recognised and extended. People believed in the company, and they believed in the directors, so we were able to extend that loyalty – and so, the brand – into other non-football-related businesses. I saw that opportunity in 1993 and I was part of that change, which was massively gratifying to see.
It’s not that you have to totally love every aspect of a business you are involved in, but you do have to have a passion for it. You have to understand the business: what it needs and how to run it. Of course, to some extent, all businesses are the same – simply put, you have money coming in and money going out, and you just have to make sure that the first sum is bigger than the second.
And I would say, in that respect, not being a big fan has been an advantage throughout my career in football. Where most people go wrong in football stems from their support for the club: it becomes the overwhelming consideration when making a decision. They overspend because they think that the team reflects personally on themselves. They say yes to everything because they’re so desperate for the club to be a success on the pitch. They forget that it’s important, too, to be a success off it. They are a supporter first and a businessperson second. That can be a dangerous trap.
When I first came into football, David Dein, a true gentleman and a friend, who was vice-chairman of Arsenal at the time, gave me a great piece of advice. He said, ‘Never let your heart rule your head in football – and never believe the manager when he says, “Just one more player.”’ That has been proved true to me over and over again. Although I admit that during Birmingham City’s Barry Fry days, when the squad swelled to 50 players, David might have wondered if I’d forgotten his advice!
Over the years I have found that most of my male counterparts are just frustrated managers. They don’t really want to be the chief exec mopping up all the day-to-day boring, complicated and less glamorous issues: they want to be on the training pitch, buying and selling the players, and in the changing room – and, secretly, they all think they’re good enough to do it.
I can’t think of anything I’d want less. Some of my managers say to me, ‘Will you come to the training ground?’ I say, ‘What for?’ At West Ham, I’ve been to the training ground once. In 16 years at Birmingham City I probably went 10 times. If I thought I could do a better job than the manager, then we’d all be in trouble. And if my managers realised why I’d turned up at the training ground, they might stop asking! If I’m there it’s always bad news for the manager – he’s probably about to lose his job.
Nonetheless, football didn’t find me, I found football. It all began when I saw a small ad in the Financial Times, saying ‘Football Club For Sale’. By then, I had been working for David Sullivan at Sport Newspapers for three years. My main responsibility was as sales and marketing director – I orchestrated the marketing campaigns, ran the sales team and controlled costs – but no one at Sports Newspapers really had one job. I had soon grasped that when you work for a small business you have to be everything: the financial director, the marketing director, the sales manager. You do the selling, and you make the tea, too. It was hard work and great fun. When I was there, the Sunday Sport had a circulation of more than a million copies and was the equivalent of the US National Enquirer. ‘World War II Bomber Found On Moon’ and ‘Hitler Was A Woman’ were our typical sort of headlines. We spent a few years, under David’s shrewd and inspirational guidance, building a fun company into a £50 million empire.
Still, I didn’t have one single clear idea of where I was going or what I wanted to do next. There was no grand plan. I was enjoying my job, enjoying being hands on and taking on more responsibility, and I was loyal to my board. After all, they had made me a director at the age of 19 to keep me motivated, giving me kudos which probably didn’t exist outside my own head! I loved it, and if they had said, ‘Karren, you’re going to Australia to run a pig farm now,’ I would have said, ‘Fine, I’ll give it a go.’
Now, at the time, I knew David wanted to get into sport. He was thinking about horse racing and I was thinking about football. We had looked at a few clubs – some were too small, such as Barnet, and some were too big, such as Spurs – and then I saw the ad for Birmingham City, which was in administration and, as I’d discover, just right.
I went to visit the club on a Friday, came back and told David that the place was a mess but that we should buy it. Having seen it, I was hungry for the challenge, something new and exciting. It took the weekend to persuade him. I was on the phone to him every 10 minutes, saying, ‘You do want this, you do, you do. Whatever money you put in, I’ll get back.’ He was 60 per cent against it, more inclined to say no than yes. But I was 100 per cent for it.
He told me he just wasn’t sure, that he was worried football clubs were a black