Upside downside

The chips are down. And so is Ipswich Town Football Club. Relegation from the Premier League means a £15m hit to the finances. But chairman David Sheepshanks isn’t daunted. “We’ll be favourites to come straight back up,” he says. Could you be so upbeat?

Ipswich Town’s relegation from the Premiership this season is a nightmare for the football club. Promoted to the top flight in 2000, the Suffolk market town team followed that by finishing fifth in 2001, meaning qualification for European football the next season. Ipswich then pulled off one of the best results in the club’s history last November by beating mighty Inter Milan (players include Brazilian superstar Ronaldo) in a one-nil home win. But while they were basking in that glory, the team was welded to the foot of the Premiership.

One man remained resolute. Ipswich chairman David Sheepshanks is a true believer in the power of positive thought. His office is lined with motivational books by the likes of Tom Peters and Stephen Covey. Former UK athletics boss Frank Dick is his personal coach. Sheepshanks even gave the entire staff at the club a motivational book to read; and he invited responses. And last season, as Premiership status was draining away, he took all 160 club staff to Helsingborgs in Sweden.

Such relentless optimism seemed to do the trick. After the run of losses, Sheepshanks brought in motivational speakers to the club and focused the playing and non-playing staff on the job in hand. Seven wins in their next eight games seemed to prove its value. But it wasn’t to be. A six-nil thrashing by Liverpool started the team on a downhill trajectory. The side managed only seven from a possible 33 points in the following 11 games. And, with the last four games of the season matching them against Arsenal, Middlesbrough, Manchester United and Liverpool, the inevitable happened. Relegation to the first division.

In bare financial terms, relegation means going from a £2m profit to a £13m loss of income. (A local newspaper reckoned relegation means a £50m loss to the local economy. After all, Rotherham will bring fewer fans than, say, Liverpool). The blow will be even harder following the collapsed ITV Digital sponsorship deal with the Nationwide league. Revenue from television and radio alone will drop from the £18.5m the club received in 2001 to, well, that’s anyone’s guess. (The figures for 2000 – the last time Ipswich were in Division One – show an income from that source of only £1.2m). Yet despite the depressing financials, Sheepshanks is still smiling.

“I called the staff together to talk to them the other day,” he says. “I had a message for them. It was that people will say we’ve failed – and there’s no doubt that on the field we have. But that doesn’t mean the club has failed. See how far we’ve come.”

A lifelong Ipswich fan, and occasional motivational speaker himself, Sheepshanks took over as Ipswich chairman at a time when, in his words, things were a mess. An ageing squad, low morale, Ipswich even lost its reputation of playing attractive football. Former non-executive director at the club, the late John Kerridge, told Sheepshanks that his greatest challenge was turning the home of Ipswich, Portman Road, from a place not to be seen into the place to be. If anyone could do it, Sheepshanks could. Even diehard Norwich City fans grudgingly admit that “Sheepy” is “a good man.”

“The first thing I did was get all the coaches around the table and talk to them about what was possible,” says Sheepshanks. He asked them if promotion in the first year was possible. Heads dropped. Okay, how about in five years? Heads came up. Yes, they said. So how? Getting the youth team right was vital, said the coaches, as was sorting out the commercial side and improving its involvement with the community. Between them, the people in that room drafted what amounted to a five-year business plan.

The plan was a good start, but it needed local support. “We had to communicate with the whole community, and by that I mean Ipswich, Suffolk, north Essex,” says Sheepshanks. “We had to make friends with them and inform them of what we were doing. In effect, we had to reintroduce ourselves to the marketplace.” With that support came on-field success. The commercial aspects of the club started to turn round and Ipswich achieved promotion at the end of five years.

“Last season, [by finishing fifth] we punched above our weight,” says Sheepshanks. “It was a phenomenal performance. I think that was a result of the momentum that the club had built up in getting promoted. A very positive spirit existed, throughout the club and the local community.” Sheepshanks’ explanation? “People will support what they help create.”

But all was not well. Sheepshanks was concerned about the impact of European qualification on the club. He visited the US and Australia on business at the start of the season and, when he returned, something had changed. He detected a whiff of arrogance and complacency – more on the field than off it. “The players thought they were better than they were,” he says. The Premiership, Sheepshanks reckons, is the best league in the world. He compares the line between footballing success and failure with leading athletes, with only hundredths of seconds separating the elite. European football meant expanding the squad of players to cope with the additional games the team had to play, something Ipswich would not have done had it not qualified for Europe. Assimilating the new players proved harder than expected.

Despite Sheepshanks’ motivational efforts, Ipswich couldn’t avoid the drop. So what went wrong? Using a mountaineering analogy, he says: “There are times that can be rocky. We’ve suffered bumps and bruises, and for me, for all of us, this particular moment is a major bump. But we’re not going to fall down the mountain. We’ll get back up. And we’ll be favourites to win it. We’ve learned our lessons.”

Review is a Sheepshanks mantra. Review when things are bad. Review when they’re good. Review when they’re somewhere in between. His wider view of the club shows anything but outright failure. “There’s no fat with our staff. And the majority of staff are involved with development and the servicing of the non-matchday revenue.” Total turnover from conferences and events activities is the same as the total turnover of the club when it got promoted. “Of course [with relegation] there is a loss of status and it’s hard. But the important thing for this club is to cut costs, not people,” says Sheepshanks. By this, he means non-playing staff. Some of last year’s footballing signings will have to go. (The number of staff rose by 20 per cent in 2001, while costs went up 100 per cent). “[Relegation] will be salutary. It’s just that now the business plan has an extra line: we will win the First Division next season.”

Sport and business are not the same, says Sheepshanks. “In business, if the sales aren’t good or the manufacturing process flawed somehow, these things can be tackled. In sport, you can change the players and the teams, but it’s all about the performance on the pitch. You can guarantee a performance but not a result.” Sheepshanks says a cast of injuries to vital players hampered the squad in the difficult times, but admits it’s a story all clubs in Ipswich’s position might tell. “Basically, at critical times, we suffered either a lack of form or a loss of confidence and played badly. A combination of factors went against us. But we believe in the management ethos of review and learning. And we’ll be back.”

It’s not just high-profile football clubs that suffer difficult times. Richard Barkey is chief executive of Imparta, a computer-based business training firm. He set up Imparta in 1998 and saw three years of solid growth and success. It didn’t last. “When September 11 and the recession came along, training budgets were among the first to be scrapped – or at least scaled back,” says Barkey. “Growth slowed up and people had to go.” Problems were looming on the horizon. “Things looked bad and virtually all our competition went bust.” Imparta had to cut a fifth of its 38-strong workforce.

Keeping spirits up at a time like this was crucial, says Barkey. Involving the staff and being honest helped. “It was how we managed it that was important. The whole thing left people feeling guilty about keeping their jobs – and knackered, since the amount of work that had to be done hadn’t decreased.” One of the first things he did was ask the staff how they thought Imparta should go about cost-cutting. This process saved some jobs, plus the staff volunteered for a ten per cent pay cut – directly saving two jobs – on the proviso that the firm would repay the money lost once things had recovered. (It has.)

The remaining staff needed reassuring. Barkey & co achieved this by brutal openness. “We do this by having what we call a town meeting. We get all the staff together every couple of months and we show them the company figures, just to reassure them that things are going okay. I end up feeling like a tomato after the grilling I get. But it’s good for the staff and good for the company.” If staff are unhappy, this will filter through to clients. So it’s vital to look after their well-being. “The staff had to understand why things were happening,” says Barkey. “It would be easy for the staff to blame the management.”

Derek Clark is chief executive of Chasseral and a former head coach of the UK and Swiss Olympic rowing teams. He also helped coach the 2002 Oxford boat crew to only its second victory in nine years in London this year. Up against a Cambridge crew full of high-calibre rowers, Clark had to inspire his team to break the run of poor results. “The thing about a losing team is that it’s lost sight of its mission,” says Clark. With the Boat Race, it’s all about working towards winning a single race. “Winning the boat race is ecstasy, losing is public humiliation. It’s the coach’s job to reduce the pressure and improve individual performances.”

One tool that worked well for Clark was measurement – using technique charts. He gave the crews (some of whom were former Olympic rowers) marks out of ten for a number of areas as the season progressed (he admits to starting out with straight “0s” for most of them). This gave a competitive element to each technical discipline and gave the whole thing a competitive framework. “Each rower wanted to better the others and themselves. They were eager to see improvements,” says Clark. He also sat the crew down and talked about the opposition – how good they were and how well trained. He then proposed to his team that there was absolutely no way on earth that Cambridge could have trained harder than they had. His crew, absolutely knackered, agreed. Clark reckons it gave them an important psychological edge.

“When an individual does something well or excels, the thing we always say to them is ‘give yourself a pat on the back, then give yourself a kick up the arse’.” In an epic race in which one of the Cambridge crew collapsed with exhaustion towards the end, Clark’s squad overcame their rivals with yards to spare.

Ipswich Town, though, will learn from its setback. Part of the lesson is the interdependence of everyone within the club. Sheepshanks has enhanced this by running a joint players and non-playing staff Christmas dinner. “The staff run this business,” he says. “We have employee of the month competitions where the winner gets a £100 voucher. And we also do something called a Wow card (a Tom Peters idea) where anyone can nominate anyone else for doing something above and beyond the call of duty.” It works. Spirits are still high.

Towards the end of our interview, Sheepshanks, whose family motto is “Perserverando”, quoted at length from Coleridge. It’s a quote he lives by: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

(There is, of course, another way to motivate in hard times. Chris Unsworth is international marketing director at Genuity, a provider of internet infrastructure services. He formerly played part-time rugby league for Widnes. “In those days, club chairmen would have been local businesspeople,” he recalls. “One a local butcher, one a pub landlord. Both were very competitive and both had a lot staked on the game. One of the teams, losing heavily at half time, found themselves face-to-face with their club’s chairman in the dressing room. He proceeded to open a case full of money and promised the team a cash bonus if they went out in the second half and beat the opposition. These were hard times and many of the players were miners. It worked. The team went out, obliterated the opposition and collected their bonus.” Just a thought.)


DO YOU NEED A LIFT?

“Go to the edge to get the advantage you need – in everything.” Frank Dick, president of the European Athletics Coaches Association.

“The ability to change a winning formula is a winning formula.” Roger Black, 400m running great and motivational speaker.

“He who never fell never climbed.” Kris Akabbusi, ditto.

“Attitude + aptitude = altitude.” Phillip Oppenheim, flamboyant ex-minister, entrepreneur, farmer, political pundit and businessman.

“I set myself targets to fail on a daily basis and when I get six in the bag I punch the air knowing that this is the pathway that leads to success.” Simon Woodroffe, entrepreneur and founder of Yo! Sushi.

“One of the best motivators I've found I call Pit Stops. They’re free, great for team-building and fun in tough times. How it works: A pit stop is an hour off work. At the end of each day everyone in the team votes to award Pit Stops to members of their team who they feel have worked especially hard or have done something outstanding. Team members collect them and save them up for when they need time off. By using them you are highlighting success and rewarding people with time for being productive in your time.” Adrian Webster, sales motivator.



Real Business thanks Speakers-uk.com, a motivational speakers agency for its help in compiling these quotes.

Jamie Oliver is associate editor of Real Business.