Balancing ethical growth with stakeholder interests
2023-05-03
Growth, governance, and Government interest are among the hot topics occupying C-Suite execs, according to a recent Centuro Global event. Top C-Suite representatives from the worlds of sport, finance, executive search, and music gave a panel talk on ‘What’s Keeping The C-Suite Awake?’ at the Centuro Global Expansion Conference in May.
A packed house of globally-focused scale-ups heard their insights on ‘top of the agenda items’ and crucially, what businesses should be focusing on in 2023.
Juliet Slot, Chief Commercial Officer at Arsenal FC, said: “When you spend 75% of your time at work you want to do something you’re passionate about. I love the sport. “I wake up every day thinking about how I’m going to accelerate the transformation that we have put in place at Arsenal… [Arsenal] has probably been a little bit asleep commercially for a few years for various reasons, and also had to take quite a step back due to the pandemic.
“[I ask] How are we going to effect transformation as quickly as possible without falling over our own feet so that we can become, once again, financially sustainable as a football club? ”Culture, gaining buy-in from the team, and moving from local to global were key to unlocking income, said Juliet.
“Arsenal was always known to be the club that balanced its books, under Wenger who bought very cleverly, and sold very cleverly on players which is a big part of your income stream, and also was progressive in terms of how we generated income. My job is to do it ethically and in the right way but to make a lot more money than we have been making so that we are financially sustainable. That’s what keeps me awake at night.”
Simon Massie-Taylor, CEO of Premiership Rugby, said he’d been struck by the earlier address from Ali Parsa, CEO of Babylon Healthcare. He said: “It was really interesting listening to Ali the founder of Babylon earlier on…the second bit was that challenge around either trying to pump up the old or focus on the new.
“For me, that’s really the thing I’m trying to do. So, what I’ve got, and what we have, is a fantastic product… Premiership Rugby is the biggest league in the country outside of football. Huge amount of interest, 10 million rugby fans around the country, and a big opportunity. So that’s the growth piece. And actually, when you look at what’s happening on the pitch and how entertaining it is, we’ve got something really special there.
So that’s old and [we’re] trying to preserve that and modernise it and make it fit for modern consumers. The difficult bit is what sits behind it; the infrastructure. What you’ve got is a sport that’s actually only relatively new from a professional view….[and] it was set up in a way that was fundamentally wrong, frankly, it created conflicts, there wasn’t the appropriate level of risk allocated across the system… the club side of things is inherently loss-making which isn’t uncommon for sports teams, but took an absolute pounding through the pandemic.”
This had led to scrutiny from multiple stakeholders, including from Government, said Simon. He said: “The real thing to focus on the major area of change is around governance to start off with. [At the moment] we’ve got conflict, we’ve got a lot of independence…. there’s a big focus on that.”
Oliver Stratton, CEO, of Arrow Global Group, shared his insights on rapid transitions, including building a new business within a group structure and moving from plc to privately owned. Talent was the key to success. He said: “It’s a people-driven business. If we didn’t have the talent and the capabilities nobody would invest in us.”
Andrea Martin CEO, of PRS for Music, described the complicated governance structure of her business, which manages royalties for artists including Elton John, Ed Sheeran, and Sting.
She said: “My focus for 2023 is all about people, people, people. We can have the greatest strategy but if we don’t have the talent….”
AI – a key topic of conversation throughout the Global Expansion Conference, was also on the agenda. Andrea said: “The key issue is AI. Especially in the UK because the UK Government wants to de-regulate copyright to advantage tech companies and you can imagine what that would do to our members. We have to make sure we protect the rights that are entrusted to us.”
The panel, moderated by Nick Robeson from Boyden Executive Search, had a shared consensus that the pandemic had provided a reset opportunity as well as its fair share of problems.
Andrea said: “25% of our revenues come from public performances, live music that’s played here, pubs or everywhere. Suddenly overnight our members didn’t have that money so we had to pivot really quickly. It was really important to have a people-focused approach – and not just employees but stakeholders… You can imagine our 165,000 members. Their livelihoods depended on us.”
The answer was a collaborative approach.
Andrea said: “So [it was] a lot around people, listening to people, helping them go through it, being authentic. I didn’t pretend that I knew the answers. I had a very strong team by then… the first thing I did when I came in was I built that strong team… finally being comfortable with change and embracing that uncertainty. But it was tough, really tough.
Simon joined Premiership Rugby at a turbulent time post-pandemic. He said: “You had knackered shellshocked people and a very divided leadership and no plan. The playbook, which I think is pretty similar for any Chief Exec coming in, was to get a plan together but create it collaboratively… you have to take everyone on that journey and you have to do it quickly… everyone needs to feel a part of it… [and] making sure people understand that in this volatile world, plans need to adapt.”
Juliet said: “For us at Arsenal the pandemic created a real opportunity… we had to make some difficult decisions but… it gave us an opportunity to be really focused on our culture.
“We’re going from ‘local to matchday to every day to global’ because we are a global brand but we were focused locally around what we did in the UK when we have 80 million people who come into our ecosystem every year to engage with Arsenal. We weren’t really serving them. We talk about serving our supporters, putting them at the heart of our business, and then moving our tech and data to allow us to serve them what they want, when they want, where they want, rather than what we want, when we want, where we want, which is what we were doing.”
The importance of resilience, agility, and having talented knowledgeable advisors around you were also touched upon by the panel. Developing the right team was critical, as was spotting who ‘wasn’t on the bus’. Andrea said: “It starts at the top. If I don’t have the mindset of change and growth then my executives don’t.”
Zain Ali, CEO of Centuro Global, said: “We wanted the Global Expansion Conference to be a platform for open, honest communication about the pressures facing businesses – and individuals of all levels – as they go for growth. This panel was a great representation of that ethos, full of insights and learnings that we and our audience can take into our own businesses.”
You can see the full keynote session here
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