Strong Woman: The Truth About Getting to the Top. Karren Brady
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it or because I had nowhere else to be. I was living in a house without central heating or a washing machine, so I was certainly in no rush to get home! What also surprised me was that some of the people I worked with spent all day thinking about what they were going to do after work. I wanted to be first in, last out and to volunteer for everything. I’d put my hand up whenever they asked for someone to do something – even if I didn’t know what they were asking for I’d say, ‘I’ll do it.’ That gave me a real edge.
I also wanted to be in the know. I wanted to meet the right people so I’d get noticed. Every Christmas, Saatchi’s had a big party and I would work out who I wanted to meet – the chairman or whoever it was – and go up to them. ‘I’m so pleased you’re here,’ I’d say, ‘because I really wanted to tell you about such and such,’ or ‘I really wanted to discuss this with you.’ I understood then something I tell a lot of women who work for me now: nobody will champion you or your career if you don’t. I never waited for someone to say, ‘You did a good job.’ I’d be saying to people, ‘Look at what I’ve done! Isn’t it great? Shouldn’t I head up the next project?’ To me, that was a more straightforward approach.
But even though I loved Saatchi’s the graduate programme was very rigid – you had to do this for six months, then that for six months, and I started to feel impatient. I think the turning point came while I was working on the Boursin cheese account. One of my jobs was to go into supermarkets and see where it was displayed, talk to the manager about why it wasn’t more prominent and file a report. Then I would go back the next week, do the same and see, over several weeks, how it was moved.
To me, that seemed the wrong way of doing things. I assumed that the prime position must be at eye level in the middle of the shelf. But when I went in on the first week all the Boursin was tucked away at the bottom where people couldn’t see it. So I simply moved it to the middle section, with its price label, and I’d go back every week and check it was still in the middle. But Saatchi’s were furious with me: that task was what the client paid them for.
I decided to move on, but with the intention of going back to Saatchi’s later. I thought if I went elsewhere and got some more experience I could reapply to Saatchi’s and miss out a year of the boring structured training. I was in such a hurry. I don’t know if that was ambition – I’ve never really understood why I was racing – but I wanted to get ahead as quickly as possible. I wanted that independence and security.
So I went from advertising and Saatchi’s to LBC, and from there to work for David Sullivan, at Sport Newspapers. Three different companies, and three different industries. In my eyes, that’s no bad thing. I meet very few women who knew at a young age what they wanted to do. Most of us find something we’re good at, then have a look around and think, You know what? I’m the best person in the room doing this so I should be running this team of people, I should be running this floor, I should be running this office, I should be running this business. Success is about making the best of your skills, whatever they are. If it’s your personality or your ability to put your back into something, make the best of it.
For me it was definitely a slow realisation of ability. I didn’t have a dying ambition to work in advertising or radio or football. I didn’t mind what it was as long as I could do it. I just wanted to find a job where I could be the best.
There is a certain story that often comes up in articles about me, when, as a 19-year-old selling radio advertising space, I pitched to David Sullivan. I had been given Asian Hour to sell, which was pretty tough – a four–five a.m. slot, the real graveyard shift. I had been handed a list of companies that spent money on advertising but who didn’t advertise on radio, and one was Sport Newspapers.
I got through to David Sullivan on the phone, and he said he wasn’t interested, that radio didn’t work. I decided I would drop off some material at his office – persistence is everything – and once I was there I decided to wait and meet him in person. I waited and waited and waited, and in the end he agreed to see me because I had waited so long. I did a very quick pitch to him and he wasn’t buying it at all, so I said, ‘Look, if you take the advertising and sales don’t go up, you don’t have to pay for it.’
He said, ‘That sounds good to me.’
I didn’t have the authority to do a deal like that, so it was a risk, but I remember thinking, Well, if it doesn’t work out, what’s the worst that can happen? They can fire me but I can always get another job – I’m only 19. I still use that kind of thinking and I have done all my life. In fact, it’s the foundation of my confidence and my ability to take risks. That episode is often considered to have been a turning point in my professional life, but in truth I think my life had been heading that way since I was a young child.
And it worked out. Sales at Sport Newspapers went up and within months Sullivan was spending more than £2 million a year on radio advertising. I was managing it all and earning more commission than all the other sales staff put together. And then he offered me a job, which I accepted. People tend to jump to conclusions about the pornography associations of Sport Newspapers, but I wasn’t working on any top-shelf titles. I was working on the Sunday Sport, and the paper was very different in those days. Nonetheless I still get criticism about that time – people say, ‘How can you stand up for women’s rights when you worked in the porn business?’ Well, the answer is that I didn’t work in the porn business. To me, that criticism is a bit like saying, ‘Sky has an adult channel, so if you work for Sky that means you work in pornography.’ Of course it doesn’t.
I realise that all this might make getting started sound easy, but there were costs – even if I thought they were worth paying. One small example: at Saatchi’s I always dressed the part. Everyone else would turn up in jeans and a T-shirt, and there would be me, immaculate in a suit. That meant that if a client came in I would always be the one selected to go and meet them, introduce them and take them round. This was a way to stand out. It would have been far more comfortable to sit in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, but that was not the person I wanted to be.
When I was a child and Dad had made a bit of money but I was still at the local comprehensive, he would pick me up from school in his Rolls-Royce. That was difficult for me because when you’re a kid you want to fit in. It made me a target. I’d say, ‘Dad!’ but he’d say, ‘What’s the problem? You should be proud.’ I remember thinking then that there was nothing worse than always being on the outside, and the urge to fit in is strong – but I guess that, ultimately, my ambition was stronger.
I had to weigh it up. When we left school my friends were off on gap years, travelling the world, or they were at university, or working in pubs while they relaxed for a while. Meanwhile I was in the office at seven a.m., and never had the energy for anything else. I didn’t get drunk after work or go clubbing at weekends. I remember David Sullivan saying to me, ‘It’s half past ten. Why are you still in the office? You’re 20 years old.’
‘Well, it’s really important, and if I don’t get it done, who’s going to do it?’
‘It can wait till tomorrow. You’ve got to have a life as well.’
But that wasn’t what I wanted. I remember that a good friend and her boyfriend were temporarily stuck for somewhere to stay, so they came to live with me in my London flat in the Docklands. She said to me, ‘Karren, you’ve never used this kitchen. There’s no kettle, no knife, no fork. I’ve opened the dishwasher and the brochure’s still inside. The oven’s still sealed up. You don’t have a life. Do you realise you don’t have a life? You eat at your desk morning, lunch and evening.’
But I didn’t care. I was doing what I wanted to do. The thought of going to a nightclub terrified me then and it terrifies me now. It’s just not me. I wanted to work and I loved work.
So that was what I did.
So at 18 I was on my way. Yet to some people it might have seemed that I had scuppered my chances at the very first hurdle. It had been crystal clear at my interview