YouSaid · the spoken record

Karren Brady

lines on the record: 89
first: 2022-04-11
most recent: 2022-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It is different, and it's different because it doesn't make anything. It doesn't manufacture anything. It doesn't produce anything other than more footballers. All its assets are people. So being able to manage people and to manage the diversity of those people. So on one hand, I have someone who works in my ticket office.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said, okay, we'll give it a go. And we did. And it was bought really quickly within three days. That was like a Friday. And on the Tuesday, we owned the club. And that was it. We went in there. We made so many mistakes, but we had a great time. It was such a fantastic experience, you know, to be given the challenge and chance of a lifetime to run a great business and change it, take it out of administration. I mean, it made a trading profit for the first time in its history after my first year. And it was a real learning curve, but it was great fun.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he, to be fair to him, he was looking at buying either a race course or a football club. He was interested in doing something in that area. And Birmingham had gone into administration. There was a little ad that said, football club was there, and I thought that's interesting. And I got the details. And I went to him. I said, there's his football clover sale. You buy it and I'll run it. And he was like, whoa, football, very male dominated. You'll have to be twice as good as the men to be thought as even only half as good. And I said, well, luckily that's not difficult”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's part and parcel of creating a place where people feel really proud to work. They feel really proud of what they do and they feel really well respected.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should there be more bars? There's huge decisions. One person cannot make those decisions, and everybody who has a stake in that decision should have a say. And that's everyone from the commercial department right through to the person who runs the disabled supporters group. Everyone needs to make that decision together. And that's how you breed great culture, listening to people, understanding the problems, finding the solutions together, having some fun while you do it. So it's not all over charts and in a very rigid way. It is much more in a conversational way. So for example, I took a load of my team to Seville when we played in Europa and we went together. We had a great time together. We used the downtime to talk about things important to us.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean look, if you think about leadership and you should never confuse leadership with management, management is about setting out a series of goals and managing people to deliver them. Very important, but that's not leadership. Leadership is about vision. And sometimes it's only a vision you can see. And your art as a leader is to persuade people to believe in your vision and help you deliver it. We have large groups of people that help deliver visions. So our next vision for West Ham, for example, is to go from a 60,000 capacity to a 62,500 capacity. And we're in the process. We've got planning permission for it. We're in the process of going through that transition. How do we sell those extra tickets? Who do we sell them to? Do we put the price up? Where do we allocate them? How do people get in?”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So your gut instinct goes, hang on a minute, I've somehow been here before and I know how this plays out. And I find if I follow my gut instinct, I tend to go make the right decisions. And if I ignore it, I tend to go bad. But sometimes you need someone to go, hang on a minute, take a step back, have another look at this, have a think about this. It's a very lonely place if you don't have people around you that want the same things as you, that want to help you achieve and build the things that you want to do. And being able to listen to people and encourage people to have their thoughts and ideas is, I think, really, really important.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great knowledge and great skills. Why wouldn't you listen to them when they tell you something? I mean, of course, you have debates. I want to do everything quickly. I want to do everything with strength and power and purpose. And others are like, oh, hang on a minute. Let's not go at that pace. Let's try and do this. Let's do something. And sometimes you follow your gut instinct because it's important. And people say to me, well, what is a gut instinct? A gut instinct, I think it's made up of all the experiences you've had through your career. And you've sort of, when you're in face with the problem, you've been in that movie before. You've had that problem before, a different problem in a different moment about a different thing, but very similar. And you know the outcome.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think if you spoke to my staff or the people that I work with, they would all say that the one thing Karen is great at is listening and understanding. And I think the minute you think as a leader of organization, you know everything is the minute you don't know anything at all. You have to believe in lifelong learning. You have to believe that the people around you are valuable enough to have a different opinion to yours that is just as important. And the minute you think they don't have an opinion that's important as yours, you either don't have the right team or you don't have the right team with the right skills. I like to employ people better than me because it sort of proves I'm better than them, if that makes sense. And then when you have people with, um,”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the most important thing, the most important thing that people want from you when you're running your organization is your time. They want time with you. They want you to listen to them. They want to be in your inner circle. They want to be part of it. That's what people want. It's become less, I think, as times have gone on about money and status and more about being in the know, being in that room when decisions are made and making people feel that they can be in the”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, I think it's important. I have a great candid atmosphere at West Ham. I want people to say what they don't think is right, what they think could be better, what needs to be changed. I think if you have too many like-minded people running the same organization, you're so busy patting each other off on the back as you sort of follow each other off the edge of the cliff. You need people to say, hang on a minute, why is this important? How does this affect us? What does this, you know, what does this mean we stand for? What are our values? What's our purpose? You need people to be honest and candid. And I think candid is good.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the part and parcel of running a great business is to have really good culture, really good culture comes from trust and being candid and being honest and supporting one another. And it's interesting that David Sullivan is still with me in West Ham, so is David Gold, two people who I started with from a very young age. And we're still all working together. And we still have lots to talk about and lots of ideas and we still bounce off each other and we trust each other. And I think that's a really fundamental part of growing a great business.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I've never really thought about it. I think you need the ability to work hard. You need the ability to push yourself forward. You need the ability to have a backbone. You need the ability to have a dogged sort of determination. And if you have a great idea, so much the better, so much the better. People say to me, you know, what is an entrepreneur? Well, an entrepreneur is someone that just spots a gap in the market. For a service or a product that is either not available or available, but they can make it better. And they're the kind of people that well-meaning people say, oh, don't do that. That's very risky. But they are prepared to back themselves and put all those doubters to one side and just plough through it. And that's sort of been what I've done for 30 years.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had nothing to lose. The worst thing that could happen is he didn't buy it. And I had to sell it to someone. I was very independent. I wasn't relying on my parents for money. I was relying on myself. I had no safety net, no nest egg. I had no, you know, no, I had to pay my rent. I had to pay my bills. I had to pay my travel. I had to pay for my food. And I had to make that sale. For me, it had to happen. It wasn't a case of, well, we'll see. I'm the kind of person that never hears the word no. When someone says no to me, I don't hear no. I hear, find another way to get what you want. And that's what I always do. I always, I think no is only really pivotal if it ultimately stops you doing what you want to do. If you hear no and you can find another way of getting what you want, that's just as good as hearing a yes.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Persuaded him. I had this art of persuasion, talked about what it could do for him, how it would work. And he took it. And that was the beginning of my one of my very own clients that stayed with me for many years and still today we're still working together at West Ham some 30 years later.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one I went to see him, so I turned up at his offices and I waited until he saw me and I waited a long time, quite a few hours, until he felt, I think, sorry for me. And I wasn't going anywhere. And he let me do the pitch, the presentation, which I did. Equally, I always had this feeling that, you know, what's the worst that can happen? And the worst that can happen is he didn't take the package and he slung me out. But the best that could happen is he saw me and he took the package. So I always looked on the bright side. So I turned up, I did the deal. I presented well. I had all the facts and figures. I knew what I was talking about. And I guess he thought he took a chance. I think the package was, I can't remember, it wasn't a lot of money. You know, it wasn't a multi-million pound deal that someone had to really think about it. I pitched it just that it would be an impulse. It could be someone that it was enough money to have a gamble, not too much, not too little, just in that spot.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he didn't think it particularly worked, and I sold him the idea that he would take the advertising package. And if sales didn't go up, he didn't have to pay for it. And he said, yeah, sounds okay to me. And I sort of thought, well, if he doesn't pay for it, I'm going to be in trouble. But I thought, I'll worry about that when that happens. I was just pleased to have made the sale. And he took the advertising. The advertising did work and he kept spending and spending and spending.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's right. Yeah, he was one of my very first clients. And he took radio advertising. And within six months of me meeting him and selling him radio advertising, he was spending £2 million a year on radio, which was the highest spender on commercial radio in the country. And I was on a really high commission. It was a good time.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I did menial office work at Sarchy and Sarchy, and I left Sarchy to go into sales at 19. And I worked for London Broadcasting Company, where we sold advertising space.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good place to start. I don't know about you, but I'm not particularly creative. I couldn't have done anything. I mean, I couldn't have done anything in the arts world or anything like that. But actually picking up the phone, having that resilience, being prepared to take the knockbacks, keep pushing forward.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Personable, I think I worked out an early age that people do business with people, and it doesn't matter how much brain you have if you don't have a personality, you can't put that brain into a good place. So having a personality and having a brain is a good combination.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went into sales, which is the sort of place where most people go when they don't really have anything else they can. Where else they can do because you're either good at it or you're not, but you don't need any particular skills other than being able to have resilience of picking up the phone, keep trying, not taking the knock backs, going forward. And I realized I was good at it. And I would never take no for an answer. I would always be determined. I would continue to pick up the phone. I had a sort of dogged attitude to not letting the knocks get me down. You know, when people sam the phone to on you or they don't want to speak, that ability to learn the language, it wasn't, do you want any, it was how many do you want? You know, it was that it was that sort of subtle change of being able to be”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there is a sense in every job you do, whether you're a pop star, you've got to sing the same songs every night. You know, whether you're working in an office or working for someone else or reporting to shareholders, there's an element of our lives that has to be done. And you get that discipline from being able to do it and power through it and approaching it in the way it needs to be approached, which is a real discipline as opposed to saying, I don't want to do it and I'm not going to do it. There's a difference.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wearing the same thing, doing the same thing, doing what you're told, not being able to explore things you were interested in. And none of us could wait to leave. But it did teach me. Resilience, the ability to do the things that need to be done when they need to be done, whether you like it or not. And that's because every day was the same. And there's a great lesson, I think, in life in being able to force yourself to do things you don't want to do because you have to. And that taught me a great deal of patience and resilience and determination.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think so. I mean, my father was quite strict. I mean, we weren't, when I say strict, not, you know, but there wasn't, we weren't sort of running around the streets doing our own thing. You know, my mother and father were very, you know, weren't disciplined in that way. I never felt disciplined. But equally, we weren't sort of latchkey kids where we came and went as we wanted. But I went to a boarding school in the middle of nowhere in a place called Ware in Hertfordshire that was a convent and it was really strict. And my friends who are still my friends from when we were at school in those days, we remember only one thing about that whole time, the boredom of simply being there and having mass sort of three times a day. And the second thing was we were hungry all the time. Every day was a fast day. So you'd have, you know, the holy saint of such and such day and it was a fast day. And we remember those two things and the sort of repressive attitude of.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're told, you eat what you're told, you wear what you're told, you do what you're told, and I'd had enough, and I knew that independence only really came when you had your own money. And the problem is at 18, I didn't know how you made money. But I kind of worked out almost everyone works for someone even before they worked for themselves. So I went out and I got a job. And at 18, with no qualifications other than O-levels and A-levels, but I'm with my core values that I really wasn't afraid to work hard and I was really ambitious and I would try anything and I would do anything. But with integrity, I went out and I got a job and I started my career.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had no qualifications. But what I had worked as something really important, and that is I'd worked out my core values. So at 18, I had worked out that I was ambitious, I was determined, and I had integrity. And core values are the things that sort of make you who you are. They are the things that lead you to make the decisions you make for yourself and the way you make decisions. And ATI, I knew those things about myself. And at 52, I think they're still my core values. And armed with those things, I set out to get a job. And the one thing I wanted for my life was independence. I wanted to say what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. And when I wanted to do it. And that's predominantly because I'd been at boarding school for a very early age, going back to my father wanted to give me the best education. He thought boarding school education was probably the best. At boarding school, you get...”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think you're very lucky if you know what you want to do, if you have a vocation or a calling at a young age. I think that is a remarkable thing that you should channel. I didn't know what I was good at. I didn't feel I was particularly good at anything. It wasn't as though I had a particular panache for anything. I wasn't particularly ambitious, but I know I wanted to do something with my life. But I didn't know what. And I think ambition is something that sort of creeps up on you slowly when you realize you're good at something. And you think, oh, actually, I'm quite good at this. And then you think, actually, I might be the best person in this room at this, or I might be the best person I know at this. And that inspires you to keep going. But I left school at 18. I had O-levels and A-levels as they were in those days.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mother was a housewife. So she had no ambitions for work, very smart woman, very nurturing in everything that she did. My dad was a way working a lot. So she was a lot.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think almost definitely the second one. I don't remember him ever sitting me down and saying, do this and your life will be better or more enriched. I think it was just learning from examples from seeing the hard work. And, you know, we went from Edmonton to a little bit further up to another little place in Edmonton to a bit further up. And our lives sort of got slightly better. And my dad's desire was to give my brother and I a really good education because he hadn't had one. So he really wanted us to have a great education because he felt that was a big part of what was missing in his life. And I guess maybe he thought if you have a great education, you don't have to work so hard, you don't have to start so much at the bottom. I think that was a real driver for him.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, definitely not on me in that way. They weren't, you know, tiger parents pushing you to the front, although my grandmother used to always say be first because it's the best place to be. She used to always say that to me. So my dad left school at 14, didn't have much of an education, and worked really hard to get where he wanted. And I guess the lesson from him was, you know, nothing compensates for hard work. And if you don't try, you know, if you don't try something, you'll never know how good you are at something. So I think maybe that sheer resilience came from his model of working hard, doing your best, trying everything, pushing yourself forward.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's another stuff. I mean, I don't remember any of these stories, but my mom said the first day of school she was a very worried if I would be shy or would I want to go home or whatever. And she went to pick me up from school and she said to the teacher, how was Kara? And she said, oh, your daughter's Carrie, she said, always she's shy. She said, Karen, shy. She said, she went up to a boy in a chair and she went, that's my seat. Get off. But I don't remember it. I don't remember any of these things. But all these little stories, they always have one thing in common that I had this sort of level of defiance and this, you know, determination to stand up for myself.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know I have no idea it's not part of any trauma that happened to me I just I guess I always felt that I had something to say and even at a young age I wanted to say it and I didn't care who heard it or you know I just felt I wanted to stand up for myself I have no idea. I've never really thought about it. I know it's definitely a part of my personality trait that this defiance, this I'm going to prove people wrong. I'm going to do what I want to do, how I want to do it. But I never really thought about where it came from.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one would, and I was very happy to stand up for myself and, you know, in life as you go through life, one of the things you realize is that if sometimes you've got to find your backbone and you've got to use it and simply put in one foot in front of the other and keep going is one of the philosophies I've had in my life. But no, always define, always stood up for myself, never took anything lying down. Yeah, I don't know.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She tells this story, and I don't remember it at all, that I got a chair and I climbed up and I opened the drinks cabinet. And they had these little sherry glasses and I poured all little bits of liquid from it. And I started to drink it. And my grandfather said, don't do that, you'll be sick. And I said, you leave me alone. I'll do what I want. I won't be sick. And then, of course, drank half of the drinks cabinet and wasn't sick. And my mum said, you were always defiant. You always had your own mind, wanted to do your own thing, thought you knew best, cut my own hair when I was six. We had a school photo the next day. And I decided the only person who could cut my hair was myself. And you should see the picture. My friend sort of starts here and sort of goes like that. And it's got all lumps cut out of it. I guess I kind of thought if I didn't stand up for myself.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I mean, my mother always tells a story that when I was for, that my grandfather was looking after me at home. And my parents had this drinks cap in it. And it was sort of opened down and it had all these like bottles of beautiful bottles and little glasses and things.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Working mother is the best title for me. Sometimes you don't get it right. You can only do the best you can do. Ambition is that spark. It's that fire inside of yourself that won't let you settle for anything other than what you think you deserve and what you want.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of Britain's most successful businesswomen. I'm the kind of person that never hears the word no. I hear find another way to get what you want. Leadership is about vision and your art as a leader is to persuade people to believe in your vision.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember my first away game and I turned up and I saw hi could you tell me where the boardroom is and he said dear you don't understand the director's wives go in the ladies room and I said Noah I don't think it's you understands I am the managing director.”
2022-04-11 · The Diary of a CEO · Karren Brady: How To Win At Entrepreneurship & Love (at the same time) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT