The Turnaround episode 1 - First bold steps

0:00This is Britain's growth moment. Do you want to be part of it? On 26th of March, 750 of the UK's most ambitious founders, CEOs and investors will gather in London to shape the future of mid-sized business. The company's driving our nation's success. The Business Leader Summit 2026 isn't just another conference. It's a day built around the three forces that define growth, ambition, policy and capital. And as one of our valued podcast listeners, you can be there in person. To secure a discounted ticket, visit the events section of our Business Leader website and use this code. BLPODCAST, all one word, all uppercase.

0:41We look forward to seeing you there. How do you go from nothing to everything? How do you go from rock bottom to the top? What does it really take to turn around an organisation? In this podcast, we'll uncover the stories of organisations that have turned their fortunes around, speaking to the instrumental people involved, and those who watched it all unfold, to find out how it happened, and the lessons that all leaders can learn from these extraordinary ascents. This is The Turnaround.

1:25Between the posts and the end of an extraordinary season. An extraordinary club. Exeter Chiefs double winners. A rain soak to Sodden. Floodlit Premiership Final won. For the second time in their history by the wonderful Exeter Chiefs. It's one of the most inspiring, astonishing stories of English rugby ever. European champions, Premiership champions, a Devon double, hail to the Chiefs.

2:11In Series 1, we look to the world of sport, which is rife with these stories. Leicester City, who went from English football's third division to unlikely Premier League champions in under a decade. Well, the US women's national soccer team, who went from relative obscurity in the late 80s to four World Cups and four Olympic golds. And then there's the Boston Red Sox, shaking off an 86-year drought and transforming from cursed underdogs into a model franchise with sustained success. But in this series, we turn our focus to the world of rugby union and the remarkable story of how a team in Devon went from playing in front of a handful of spectators at a small ground to beating the odds and making it into English rugby's top flights, suffering unbearable heartbreak on the biggest stage and finally conquering all in the English and European competitions in the same season, all within two decades.

3:10That team is Exeter Chiefs. I meet with coaches, players, and those who follow the journey along the way, as well as organizational psychologists to analyze the moves they made to truly understand the anatomy of a turnaround and how you can apply these lessons to your organization. I'm Josh Dornbrack, a business journalist and an unashamed rugby fan. This is a new podcast by Business Leader that lifts the lid on organizational change. Through visionary leadership, strategic decisions and a relentless pursuit of excellence, Exeter Chiefs rewrote their story just as any organisation can. In this episode, we follow the club's transition to professionalism, its efforts to find leadership with a cultural fit and find out how a bold strategy helped launch this turnaround.

4:00But first, we pick up the story in the mid-90s. Exeter Chiefs played out of the county ground, a small stadium with a capacity of only a few thousand around a mile east of Exeter's city centre. It had a rich history, hosting the opening match of the New Zealand rugby team's first ever British tour against the Devon County 15 in 1905. Due to their completely black attire, it was during this game that the team was first christened the All Blacks. But that was in the past. By the mid-90s, the club found themselves encouraged League Division 4, the fourth division of English rugby. And the game was changing fast.

4:41It was an amateur sport, with players working normal jobs alongside playing for their club and country. But this all changed when the game turned professional in 1995. However, the transition was a slow one. Alex Spink is a veteran rugby journalist and a writer for Planet Sport. It was kind of drag kicking and screaming into professionalism. There was a sense before that of this phrase shamitarism, that various countries were paying their players kind of under the table and it was just time to kind of get honest with the sport. Enter local Exeter businessman Tony Rowe, who was known in the region for setting up a successful telecommunications business.

5:21In 1993, I was approached by a committee member of Exeter Rugby Club about sponsorship of the rugby. And so I was taken along to the old county ground and meet the chairman, who was a chap called John Baxter. And that was around the time that the RFU had decided they would allow sponsorship on rugby jerseys. The club needed some money, so we agreed a sponsorship deal for£4 ,000. And I was, you know, made no bones about it, use rugby to promote my business, so forth Tonycoms. Tony Rowe's role grew to more than just that initial cash injection. He began to advise the committee about how they could attract more commercial sponsorship.

6:07The ambition began to bleed onto the field of play. Back-to-back promotions saw the team get to the second division by the 1997-1998 season. But Rowe had a larger vision for the club, a view that wasn't shared by its committee. The old boys didn't quite share the ambition Didn't see where we got to go to Also you remember that in the late 90s There was a lot of clubs went bust Because they had their ambition to get in the premiership Well stay in the premiership And they sold their ground and invested in players And the players took all their money and didn't perform And the clubs went bust And I insisted from day one that we should not sell the county ground To put players on the pitch what we should really do is form the club into a limited company and have a board of directors and run it as a proper business.

6:54I remember I went off snow skiing and when I came back I think there was a secretary of the club phoned me up and said oh while you're away Tony we formed a limited company and we decided we'd like you to take charge as the chairman if you could. So I thought about it and then decided to do it and took over the reins of the club in 98. So I basically said to the chairman at the time who was Kieran Northcott. I said, right, disband your committee. Tell them to go home. We've got a board of directors. We'll run the club. Alex Spink again. They created this limited company. Tony Rowe came in to kind of front it up.

7:30They had, I think, seven investors. An awful lot of local people got involved, individuals, businesses, sponsors. And they just started to kind of get things going in a sort of, not an ad hoc way, they were quite organised. In that respect, they were slightly ahead of their time because they were down in the lower leagues. And I don't think anyone at the time would have foreseen where this would take them. It was set up as a members club, as explained by Nick Warren, who covered the team at the time for the Exeter Express and Echo. The idea, as always, was the club was owned by the members. And it means that the members owned the club.

8:07They had the shareholders effectively. They're the ones who voted AGMs on the way forward for the club. They appoint trustees to look out for their interests with a board of directors, obviously led by Tony Rowe, winning the club on a day-to-day basis and they're giving leeway to obviously win the club as they see fit. And the first thing we'd done was appointed a professional full-time coach, a chap called Ian Bremner. Bremner took charge of Exeter with a strict brief of turning it into a semi-professional team. The club rebranded itself as Exeter Chiefs and off the pitch, Rowe's vision for a viable business began to take shape.

8:42I think when I took over in 98, the turnover of the club was probably about 200 ,000 a year. When I first went to the county ground, there was a handful of people watching it. In the late 90s, early 2000s, we built that number up to around 1 ,800, 2 ,000 supporters each game, which was really good. We decided if we were going to have a go at the premiership, we needed a decent ground. We looked at remodelling the old county ground, which would have been the preferred way to go at the time, but discovered that over the years, the committees had sold off bits of ground and they'd sold them with a covenant that nobody would ever build anything on the stadium above two storeys high.

9:25So I met with all the residents down there and said, look, I want to rebuild the stadium, make it around a 20 ,000 capacity if I can. and they all said, no, no, no, can't do that, can't do that. So they decided they were going to object, which they had a right to. So we then went and worked with Exeter City Council to find our venue here at Sandy Park. The sale of the county grant enabled the club to buy a 25-acre site on the eastern edge of the city. Today, Sandy Park has a capacity of over 15 ,000. The West Grandstand has a view of the idyllic countryside with a view of the River Axe estuary in the distance.

10:08Lining the top of the grandstand are the corporate boxes, where I spoke to Rowe. During our time together, he proudly explained how he'd toured stadiums from all sports up and down the country to get the details of the build just right. One such detail was from ex-Worster Warriors chairman Cecil Duckworth, who revealed to Rowe that the mistake they'd made in the build of Six Way Stadium was that the boxes had fixed walls. As a result, Sandy Park's boxes have demountable walls to be able to expand their capacity. The conference and banqueting side of the business is bustling, with two events simultaneously happening on the day of my chat with Ro.

10:44These kinds of events provide the club with a valuable stream of income outside of the limited number of home games every season, as explained by Deputy Rugby Correspondent at the Times, Will Callagher. Owning a stadium is vital, as you can kind of make money out of what people would call the wet and the dry. So the beer, the food, things that aren't just the ticket to the game. And some clubs own their stadium and so get the access to all of that cash, whereas other clubs rent it off the council or borrow it from a football team in the past. So they can't get that. And so essentially, you're not making the money you could do out of match days.

11:18And then the second element of it, too, is if you own your stadium, events outside of those weekends, you can drive some revenue, right? So Sandy Park, for example, hosts conferences, weddings, Christmas parties, bar mitzvahs, whatever, other events, which can make them money when they're not filling the stadium on Saturdays. If you own your stadium and if you have the use of it 365 days of the year, then clearly you're going to make a lot more money than if you don't. In 2005, Exeter Chiefs began work on the main grandstand at Sandy Park to give the ground an initial capacity of 5 ,000. The price tag on the land purchase and build was around£17 million, a lot for a club that had never had a taste of top-flight rugby.

12:00After a four-match losing streak, and with the club languishing in the middle of the second division table, Tony Rowe was still not happy with the team's performance on the field. The club parted company with its head coach in January 2006 and decided to look for a higher-profile external coach. The man they turned to was Pete Druitt, who had been involved in the England Age Group pathway for well over a decade. He took over as director of rugby at the same time that the club moved into Sandy Park. Chiefs played their first game at their new home on the 16th of September 2006 against a familiar foe, as recalled by Tony Rowe.

12:39I remember vividly, three o 'clock kickoff against Coventry, who had played the last game down at the old County Grove, the first game here, and we had a sullate. First day, 5 ,000 sullate. Absolutely brilliant. And that season was really good for us because we left the old county ground with an average of sort of 1 ,800, 2 ,000. First game here, 5 ,000. That season, our average for the season was over 4 ,000. So just moving to Sandy Park, we doubled our supporter base, which was great because it gave us a bit more cash. Commercially, when we left the old county ground, I think the turnover when we left there, it wasn't no more than a million pound.

13:19In the first season here, our turnover went up to somewhere around about£3 million. On the pitch, we still couldn't quite get what we needed to do to get into the premiership. Trying to break free of its humble roots, the club needed to punch above its weight, especially in a rugby-rich region, as Alex Spink explains. I mean, it was such a fascinating geographical, almost geopolitical set-up in the south-west of the country. You had Bath, who in the amateur years were the biggest team in Europe. Gloucester and Bristol, who had all had their moments. Exeter had never really had any of these moments.

13:57And yet, bubbling under, down the M5, there was this club which was growing apace. They'd knocked on the door a few times in the second tier, trying to get into the top flight. They just couldn't quite make it. After a three-year stint in charge, Pete Druitt was let go. The feeling around the club at the time was that the previous coaches didn't quite understand what made X2 Rugby great. What it took to mould this group of players together as a team and break through to the premiership. The man Chiefs turned to next understood the DNA of the club more than most. In fact, his dad was the person who brokered the sponsorship deal with Tony Rowe years earlier.

14:37And so I was taken along to the old county ground and meet the chairman, who was a chap called John Baxter. Rob Baxter joined Exeter as a youth player in the late 80s. His playing career spanned 16 seasons, making over 300 appearances for the club. This intimate knowledge gave him an understanding that very few had. His dad took him along for the first time to the club that he's still synonymous with, he's now synonymous with. TNT and ITV rugby commentator Nick Mullins. He's been a ball boy. He was operating the scoreboard, the old wooden scoreboard in the old days of the county ground, which was the place they played at for 100 years before they moved to Sandy Park.

15:20He helped paint the lines and then he became a player for 14 years and then he capped in the side for 10 years. He is of Exeter soil. He's from a family of Devon farmers. His brother Richie, who we played alongside for a while, now runs the family farm, not far from the ground where they play their rugby. He's part of what they're about in a way that very few other coaches are anywhere in the professional game. Let's hear from the man himself, Rob Baxter. My career has just developed where I was captain for a long time and the leadership element of it, the organisation element of it, something that interested me.

16:01I had the opportunity to start doing some coaching at the extra university. I really enjoyed that. At the time Pete took over, I kind of moved into full-time coaching. Then I became a full-time kind of forwards and defence coach. I also was our full-time analyst, which I'd started doing at the university. Roe approached the board to offer Baxter the role of director of rugby in 2009 and to build a backroom team around him. The team consisted of former Chiefs player Ricky Pello, ex-England international Robin Cowling, and Rob Gibson, all of whom worked at the Exeter Chiefs Academy. However, like all good leaders, Baxter knew his own limitations and he knew he couldn't embark on this challenge alone.

16:40And Rob said, yeah, but can I appoint my own Bax coach? I wasn't going to sit there and pretend that I knew everything about Bax play. I was pretty comfortable with what I could do with the forwards and with the defence or whatever, but I knew we needed to interview an attack and Bax coach. He went away and came back a couple of days later and told me he wanted to appoint Ali Heifer. During his playing career, Ali Heifer made around 50 appearances for Northampton Saints, most notably picking up European rugby's top prize by winning the Heineken Cup final in the year 2000. After being forced to retire due to a knee injury, Heifer started coaching at the Saints Academy in 2006, but didn't feel like he'd be able to rise through the ranks at the club.

17:21He reflects on that initial meeting back in 2009. I came down, met Rob and a couple of board members and we just had a good chat, chat through stuff. It wasn't too much of a grilling. The real sell was in the ambition and the potential to get into the premiership and, you know, ultimately to try and stay in there. It was fantastic for me that he was in the academy working with young players and developing young players because obviously that was my background. I was at the university trying to bring young players through and that meant between us we felt very comfortable putting a squad together but knowing that at every stage we had to be looking to develop.

17:57It wasn't going to be this is the game plan, we win a game. It was going to be yes there's a game plan to try and win this game but actually we're going to have to spend quite a bit of time every week seeing how much better we can become. The coaching team set off into the 2009-2010 season with a clear goal of making it into the Premiership. Baxter's previous roles as a player and assistant coach had given him a front row seat to see what needed to be done differently. But it wasn't a case of ripping it up and starting again, because the club already had the foundations of a successful team, and more importantly, the culture of one.

18:30I know when I was playing what led to our best performances. And it's when we had a group of guys together, we felt we were kind of sacrificing together you know everyone was everyone was making sure they got to training everyone was making sure they did the extra little bits but also that you know after a game we also spent that bit of time together girlfriends wives wanted to be part of it with us because I genuinely felt that and saw that happen it was always very important for me that we made a real effort to maintain that making sure the lads can come in and feel part of the group that can have fun together, can enjoy their success together, but also understand how important they are to each other.

19:08Those, to me, are the fundamentals that we want to have in the group and in the squad. Actually, I saw us sometimes achieve things we should never have achieved based on talent alone, but I also saw us fail. And you remember the both. And probably the times we failed was when we lost that feeling of unbeatable togetherness. The strength of Exeter has always been that the whole is greater than the sum of all parts. The strength of that playing group and the cohesion is something I've never experienced at other clubs. Hayden Thomas first joined Exeter in 2003 under Ian Bremner and the captaincy of Rob Baxter.

19:43He left after a two-year stint at the club, going on to play for Gloucester and Bristol, but he was tempted back at the start of Baxter's tenure as head coach. This was the start of a new recruitment strategy, and it was very different to the approach taken by the previous coach, Pete Druitt. Championship seasons are long and they're pretty attritional and Pete liked to have good strength and depth so kind of good numbers to the squad For me, from the outside before Exeter we were recruiting a lot of Championship players and sort of almost stacking them up and I'd always thought you need to be looking at trying to get some Premiership players and Premiership quality into that Championship to get you up but by the time I started Rob had already started that process What I felt was that We could afford to reduce some numbers in the squad and probably use our resources on maybe a smaller squad, but bring in important players in some important positions who added it.

20:37It gave us a little bit more bite, a little bit more direction. While recruitment was important, Baxter's years as part of the coaching setup had given him a first-hand look at where they were falling short. I kind of realised we were missing out on a lot of the obvious kind of stats and KPIs and things that probably get missed unless you look at them in detail. and that's something that probably has been a foundation of my coaching is that I started doing the individual analysis coding whatever for the team when I first came into coaching I still do that now it's something I've just always done I've always kept my finger on that I do that individual stuff for me it's that kind of detail I mean I look at the players and they know I know exactly what happened in any game and there's no real way out.

21:20Baxter took over at a time when professional rugby was largely in its infancy looking back with the lens of today, he was on to something special early on. The Times will kill her again. Steve Borthwick, for example, the England head coach, he used to be at Leicester Tigers and has coached as an assistant with England and was a player for a long time. He is a super data-led, informed coach. And while he was at Leicester Tigers, he struck up a partnership with a data company called Oval Insights and essentially informed quite a lot of the game plan because this is what the stats are telling you about how you win matches and almost some of it also was influencing substitutions and when you bring players on when you can see players are hitting their kind of red zone of when they might be fatigued or getting injured during a season not just in a game and that sometimes is measured by these gps units that they have in the back of their shirt so people have watched rugby you can see there's a little rectangular box at the top of the back of their shirts that's stitched into the jersey and then you wear that in training and everything else so if you bring it to someone like Rob Baxter, he was doing all of this stuff on a kind of shoestring budget, really, when he was in the championship in the noughties and just left being a player and became a coach.

22:33What Rob does is he kind of what he calls coding their matches. So that'll be going through clips, analysing several games that that player has played through that season for whichever club or international side he's from. And he'll clip them up and go through the actions each player has made and then present a thing to them and go, I think you're really good at this but we can make you improve at this that and the other and we want you to be this type of player I think you should be running those sorts of lines or hitting those sorts of rucks for example analyzing their strengths and weaknesses basically and there have been people in the past who've been signed by him have been kind of blown away by that level of detail and that's kind of sealed the deal for why they've joined next to the Chiefs and I think that opened up that whole kind of real a lot of time spent on individual analysis a lot of time spent on individual reviews a lot time spent on individual skills.

23:20This approach was complemented by a best practice that Ali Heifer insisted on when he joined the club. One thing that Ali was very keen on and it was a key fundamental for us was that whatever happened we spent we spent a good section of each week working on ourselves and how we improved regardless of what the results were happening in and around us so that the players and the team always felt we were progressing. Organisational psychologist Don Armand, says that there's a key lesson in this approach for organisations. He's also a former Exeter Chiefs player, so he's got an intimate knowledge of the club's inner workings.

23:56What can we control? We can't control results that are happening, so we don't want to rely on results. So we need to look at, if we ran a certain play this way, are we going to run it more efficiently? We're in the right place. It wasn't perhaps the opposition that did a really good job. It was us not doing a better version of that play that we could. So let's look at that. because then we were looking at what we could control. It empowers the individual because they go, okay, my role in that setup, I could have done that a little bit more effectively. And if we can do that as effective as possible, then it doesn't matter how the opposition turns up because they're going to have to do 100 % effort to stop us.

24:32But if we do that same thing again and they put 99%, then we're going to score. That's where I think that real beauty of what that principle is, is we often will look outside in business and look at everything else, but forget what are we actually looking at to improve week by week how much review preview that we do in rugby are you doing in business because in business it's five days a week performing so you come in and you perform and you make sure we're doing this we're getting that right but how often do you have a meeting that's going what did we do last week did we get that task achieved how much better could we do that okay we could actually improve this system so let's go and try that let's say call it a review preview so you understand that it's not about performing all the time.

25:12It's about review, preview, perform, review, preview, perform. With pre-season taken into account, the team was preparing for a 50-week long season in a bid to get to the premiership. But this championship season had a very different twist to years gone by, as Nick Warren explains. That 2009-2010 season was the first season that the second tier was called the championship. The RFU decided that rather than just being a straight league format and whoever finishes top of the table is in position to go up. It'll be decided, like the Premiership was, with a playoff at the end of the season. Baxter and his team made a bold call about how they would structure the season too.

25:50The plan was different to that of their main rivals, Bristol, who were favourites to go back into the Premiership, having been relegated the season before. But the plan also defined conventional wisdom at the time, specifically when it came to strength and conditioning, or as it's known in the sporting world, S &C. In the time I was the forwards coach here, so Paddy Anson was our S &C coach, we used to share a room on away trips. So we'd discuss lots of things around season planning. I actually, as part of my Level 4, produced a document on season planning and that part of that was all S &C. So I spent a lot of time with him talking through the way you could build for a season and how different season structures might work, what was the best way to get to the end in the best condition.

26:35Former Chiefs player Hayden Thomas again. There were two minds of thought on it. So Bristol thought, right, we'll have a slow pre-season and we'll build the season and we'll peak for the final. We went hard out in the pre-season and then we said we're going to have a mid-season pre-season. Finishing top wasn't the most important thing, but finishing the top two or three or four was important because that gave you the better pool and the better home fixtures, etc. And we actually decided that there was going to be a period where actually we were going to potentially concede some games by having quite a tough conditioning block around the middle of the season, around the Christmas period, to enable us then to push on almost like in a second part of the season in the playoffs.

27:14However, this approach wasn't without its risks. And when the team lost three games midway through the season, the fans let the coaches know how they felt. We lost a few games around that mid-period, one of them being Bristol here at home. I had a few arguments in the bar, you know, in and around that loss. You know, what we're doing, we're losing our way. hey, literally, you know, people are going mental. I'm going, come on, we have got a bit of a plan here. We are going to be okay. We think we're going to get stronger. The approach was one that Baxter had thought through with his coaching team.

27:44But most importantly, he had the buy-in of the changing room. The players were very aware of it. It was a dedicated plan and we said to them, you're going to spend a lot of time in the gym, not a lot of time on the field. We might be a bit underprepared. Don't be overly concerned about it. This is for the peak in these games. even though we lost that meant you could brush it a bit it was always about growing that side towards the final anyway and I kind of thought if we came up short as long as everyone could look and go well that's a developing team that's a growing side then I'm kind of doing my job and we made sure we didn't lose our focus on that.

28:20Maintaining focus but taking pressure off is a fine line that every leader has to tread but the Exeter coaching staff found a few creative ways to do this. I remember one of the games at the end of a block was Bedford away, which we said, let's look at this as being a qualifying game. Then the two legs of the semi will say that's our next three games. If we win all three, we'll pretend after the Bedford game we've won and you can get to feel it. And so we had this weird thing where partway through a season we got the captain in the middle of Bedford changing room with a bottle of champagne going, whoop, whoop, look, we just, we won.

28:53But we did lots of little things like that. We just kind of reproduced what it might feel like. Exeter Chiefs finished the regular season with 19 wins from 22 games played. But Bristol finished top of the log with four more bonus points than their West Country rivals. The season headed to the playoffs. But off the field, something very special was happening for the team, spearheaded by the board and its chairman, Tony Rowe. In January 2010, we only had a capacity of about 8 ,500. To get into the premiership, we had to have a minimum capacity of 10 ,000. I looked at the situation and I probably had a chat with Rob and said, do you reckon we can make it?

29:34And Rob as he is, he's always very confident, but he probably cautiously said he thought we could. I went back to the board and said, look, we've got to build the North Grandstand and we've got to do it in the next two months because if we don't do it and we win the championship, they won't let us in. So we very quickly got contractors in and built the North Stand. The lads were turning up here to train. through those playoff games and watching that it was the end terrace standing area there that was being built and of course the lads were asking what's going on what's going on and we as coach were better go well that's for when we win the final we get the premiership we can we can take it we can accept it and it was a hugely powerful thing for the club to be doing and investing in i said to tony at the time it was one of the most important things the club did because it made it real it wasn't like oh we'll give it a go and we'll see what happens and we'll find a temporary stand it was like it's there look it's going in this is real we're backing you to to do it At the end of the 2009-2010 season, Exeter won four out of their six pool matches and finished top of their group.

30:35Bristol finished top of their group by winning five games. Both teams won their semi-finals, setting the stage for a two-legged final for the championship title and a place in the premiership. This series on The Turnaround. Everyone was kind of told at some point you were good enough. And I actually got those five or six of our best young players in the room. First thing I want to say is we're going to win a trophy. The old cliche about you learn more in defeat than in victory, I think is true. It was like almost so much disappointment and heartache that it just drove boys to achieve bigger and better things.

31:06You could turn around and be like, Ali, when are you going to let the guys just enjoy the win? Well, if he did, we would have enjoyed that win and never won another final. And I'll be honest with you, the guys who fight to stay outside that are the guys who've let go. It was certainly the biggest scandal in the history of English professional club rugby. It was one of those things where no one knew what the hell was going on. There's no owner with deep pockets here, which there is, I think, at every other club. We've seen how, unfortunately, not deep some pockets have been. The year they won promotion to the premiership, it wasn't a question of if they would go down.

31:36It was a question of which months early in 2011 their relegation would be confirmed.

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