E188 - Phil Giles: The man who helped build Brentford FC

0:00Hi there, I'm Jake Humphrey and you're listening to High Performance, the award-winning podcast that reminds you it's within. Greetings to our listeners right across the world who tune in to us weekly so that we can be your armour, your partner, your guide in a world that often feels so negative, so divisive and confused. Look, we really hope that these conversations remind you of your power, your potential and what we're all capable of. So right now, allow Professor Hughes and myself to unlock the mind of another fascinating guest so they can be your teacher. Today, this awaits you. You know, when you talk about a high-performance environment and trying to just be better every day, when your owner is so aligned to that idea and he's not judging the results himself, he's judging the underlying performances and what's happening on the ground day to day, it means that actually people can be confident and actually be faithful to that belief, which I think a lot of us believe is probably the right way to go to try and forget about the results, to try and look at the underlying performances.

1:02Is there a moment in any business where talent just trumps everything else and you just want that guy in the building because he's Christian Eriksson and can do amazing things with the football. Do you sometimes just forget about your values just to get the quality in the door? No, never. Had he been, in some sense, a bad character, in that binary sense, you should resist all temptation to bring them in. It would be a disaster. How much role do you think luck plays? And I had to think and said 80%. 80 %? 80 %. 80 % luck. I think it's a lot higher than people already give it credit for. how much luck is involved in what we see in football and how much luck plays a part in shaping results and shaping careers and shaping decisions.

1:44So many things that need to go right for you to be successful or can easily go wrong for things to not work out the way you want. Well, this was a really enjoyable conversation to record, actually. For those of you outside of the UK, you might not know that my other job is as a football host. You know, I've spent the last 10 years presenting Premier League and Champions League football. And over the last few years, one of the most fascinating, interesting and successful teams in English football has been Brentford. They're based in West London and they have risen through the ranks of English football and they're holding their own in the Premier League.

2:15They are shocking the big teams on a weekly basis and they haven't done it by breaking the bank. They have done it by being sustainable. They've done it by creating a culture. They've done it through fostering self-belief and having a really clear plan. But most interestingly of all, they haven't done it in the way that most other clubs have. And I think so often in the world, you know, everyone just copies what everyone else has done. Who are the first people to break the mould? Who are the bravest people to decide that there might be another way? It's a risky thing, particularly when it comes to the money that's involved in Premier League football.

2:47So we decided to sit down with Phil Giles, who's the director of football at Brentford. He has been there for a few years now. He was brought in by the current owner, Matthew Benham, and he really is the man who's overseen the transformation at this football club. And this was a really honest, open, true conversation about what Brentford have done, how they've done it, and most crucially, how you in the life that you live can learn from the things that they've done. Because this is not a conversation about football. This is a conversation about building cultures, taking people on the journey with you and creating something really special.

3:22So I really hope you enjoy this. Don't forget, you can also watch these interviews on YouTube as well as listen to them wherever you get your podcasts. And if you could do just one thing for us. We simply ask you to click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us to grow this channel and the bigger we can grow it, the bigger the caliber of guests that we can invite on and the more impact that we can have for you. I think you're going to love this conversation. Let's get straight to it. Here is the Director of Football at Brentford, Phil Giles.

4:00Thank you very much for joining us. My absolute pleasure. So let's start as we always do. Your definition, please, of high performance. For me, high performance is the desire to want to be better every day, to want to continually improve, reach a new ceiling. And we can also talk about a high performance environment, which is hopefully sitting in Brentford's training ground now, is a high performance environment. And how do you construct a high performance environment? What do you have to put in? What are the foundations you need to put in there? but fundamentally it's all in the mind about that desire and that willingness to reach the next level.

4:33And I'm not sure you ever know whether you've reached your highest level. You're always trying to get to the highest level. I'm not sure you ever realise or know when you're at that point. You probably realise years later when you're well down the other side of the peak, right? So how does a mindset of continuing improvement operate within a sport where it's all about the end result and it's all about being judged on the points you have on the board at the end of the season? and football's about outcome. Your life is about the process. So that's the, I think you could hit on a key point there is about actually for someone like me, running a football club is not putting too much weight on the outcome, not judging it based on results.

5:12You know, one of the things about football is you go home after a game on a Saturday and then you can turn the television on and on national news and it's got the league table and you're effectively putting on the television a judgment on how you're doing, which at the minute for Brentford's going quite well, which is good. But it's kind of trying to ignore that and trying to take that out there and say, no, that's not how we're going to judge our success. We're going to judge it on the process we're putting in place and whether we believe that will ultimately lead to success in the future, not whether we're delivering it right now.

5:41So you're a club that's almost been defined by having a very specific philosophy, Phil. So can you tell us the best story that would give our listeners an insight into how you do things around here? the key thing that we try and do is try and measure the underlying performances of how we're playing and then be able to kind of relay that to players and to staff members and to keep them level on exactly exactly where we think we are probably the best example of that in terms of specific moments since i've been here which is best part of eight years was when we lost the the playoff final in the championship against fulham and that was the end of a covid impacted season and there was a huge disappointment in the dressing room for me my job was uh was to be there in that moment in the in the days following and remind people you know that result that one game is is you know could it couldn't go either way against fulham local you know local rivals very close level you can win it you can lose like a coin flip so it's about reminding people and saying look we're going to go very quickly in that season straight into the next season remember where our level is it we're already still one of the best teams in the championship right now we're going to get another chance within the next few months to be there again for me it's about saying right forget what happened quickly as possible we need to move on quickly but that's an important point that you mentioned there as well about the emotion as well as the logic so i get that you can look at it and you can look at the stats and the facts to know where you're operating and where you should be but then i'm interested in exploring the topic of intuition or feeling and emotions as well and how that how that drives your decisions in that moment in that game i think few people really wanted to punch me in the face when i was kind of calm and saying look don't worry about it and my job is to be that calm steady person and not get too emotional but what you do need is you do need those emotions in and around the group in the training ground and the rest of it which is why it's so important that you get this nice balance within the collection of stuff that you've got to have a little bit of emotion, a little bit of calmness and people who are using processes in a calm, rational way, but then people who are providing the little bit of, yeah, like I said, emotion that you need.

7:51And Thomas Frank, our manager, has a great balance, but also can provide that. And we've got some players who provide that because it is an emotional sport and you do need that to reach the highest levels on the pitch, I think. I think this is a fascinating area for us to sort of delve into a bit because you're operating in a sport that is all about the result. It's all about, you know, in my other job as a football presenter, I think we base a lot of our punditry on the scoreline. And, you know, I remember a good example, Manchester United in the final of European competition a couple of years ago, went to a penalty shootout, hit the post, didn't win the trophy.

8:24Then the conversation is the managers failed. Well, the manager was, you know, the width of the post away from succeeding. So it's how we get the messaging right. How do you share that message with people outside of the football club, the fans I'm thinking of in particular here? that you can still buy into a journey, even if at times it looks like it's not going in the right direction? I think the biggest challenge with our fans has been when we've sold players. Not so much results. I think one of the lucky things about the weekend at Brentford is because of the history of the club's not been of great success over many years, the fans are great.

8:56In the championship, they were living the dream, frankly, let alone the Premier League. So they're incredibly patient with us. I think where they've been frustrated is not so much on losing a game or the odd result here and there, is when we've sold players, we've sold our best players year on year on year and you've tried to explain to them, look, there's a rational, calm, thoughtful process behind that towards trying to achieve something, which is get promoted. We're a selling club, we'll have to sell. But trust us because we're going to reinvest that and try and actually grow the club in a slow, steady, thoughtful, calm way, not worry too much about, oh, we lost last Saturday, or I think Thomas lost eight of his first 10 games, something like that.

9:36and we didn't react to that. It was about, and some of the fans were saying, get rid of the manager, you know, it's all bad, but we just looked at the performances and the underlying training and the feeling around the training round was still good. So why change a manager? There's no need to do that. Would you talk a bit more about that period then? Because I think that, you know, when we want the listeners to this to understand why things at this football club are perhaps different to others, many football clubs would have perhaps made a change of manager at that point. What information are you looking at?

10:03What are you learning from it? how are you dealing with it to understand that results are telling the outside world one thing but internally here you believe something else yeah I think um we're going back a few years in terms of when Thomas was there but some of the stuff that is now I think fairly standard in football things like the xg measurements are things you can look at and quite quickly say well did you really underperform there you know the quality of the chances that you made ultimately what you're trying to do is create more better quality chances than your opponent that's fundamentally what football is about whether they go in or not is exactly back to what you just said before about it might hit a post and come out for some people that completely changes your understanding of what happened in that game and you've got to try and strip that out and say no no like did we create high quality chances did we prevent the opposition from conceding them that fundamentally is all that matters and if you can you know we you know we've been measuring that for a long time but I think that's now like I said more commonplace in football if you focus more on that and the underlying processes that went into delivering those outputs and less about the actual result itself, then I think you can be confident that at some point things will turn and change as long as staff keep believing that's true, as long as players keep believing that's true.

11:11And that's what happened with us, with Thomas. You know, we lost to Aeve's first 10, but there was never a hint that there was ever a doubt that we wouldn't continue with him and we believed that we'd actually be successful long-term. But take us to the start of that process, because you said there, as long as players believe it's true or staff believe it's true. But at the very start of this, you're speaking a language that isn't commonplace, that you're coming in with stats and facts, like expected goals, that is just not part of the currency of language around a place like Brentford. And one of the easy dismissals is, but what do you know?

11:48How many caps have you won? How many times have you played in the Premier League? How did you get them to believe and trust in your message without necessarily being able to trade on being well steeped or versed in football? Well, I think you've got to show that you understand the game anyway, even if you haven't played it. I mean, there's a lot of people who haven't played the game necessarily to a high level, but have a very strong understanding. A lot of coaches who've done that, you know, gone under, you know, coached at a much higher level than they've actually played as. You know, when I came into the club, some of these concepts and ideas, everyone was fully aware that Arrona was fully bought into, you know, some of this stuff.

12:21And, you know, he's a very, very smart guy. And it was, you know, so this was very much a top-down approach. And I came in here very much aligned to him and in sync with him about sort of things that we wanted to try and achieve. But what you don't do is you don't walk into a training ground with a laptop and a spreadsheet and go, right, this is what I'm measuring you on. There's a human side to it, which is, you know, sit down with people, you get to know them, you just have cups of coffee with them, right? You just sort of, you know, how do you see it? What do you think? Where do you think we can get better?

12:45You know, if you want to be a high performance environment and you want to get better, where do you think we can be better? What do you see? There's a lot of talent and ability in your stuff. You need to try and get that out, bring that to the fore and then start shaping that and saying, right, well, I hear what you're saying. I think we can do that. I think we can measure it in this way. What do you think? You know, if we start, you tell me we think we'd be better here and here and here, but how can we ultimately measure whether we're improving in that area or not? And fundamentally, actually, if we do start improving in that area, do you think that'll help us go back to the point of winning it?

13:12That's ultimately what you're doing. You do want to win the games at the end of it. You do want to believe that what you're doing is going to lead to ultimately performance on the pitch and ultimately winning games. But if we go into, say, like when Mark Warburton was here as coach, and my understanding, and I might be incorrect on this, so challenge me if so, was that you were looking at the performance of where the team were in the championship and sensing that it almost told a lie, that it wasn't an accurate reflection of where the team was currently operating. Now, I can imagine you go into a room of coaches and you share that insight with them.

13:47That doesn't always necessarily go down well. so how did you handle a situation like that for example well the good thing was i wasn't here at the time so mark warburn was manager before i came in actually he was um he was manager who took brentford out of league one in 2014 did a fantastic job and then by that christmas first year in the championship i think brentford were like in the top two or three i mean it was like an unbelievable success really in terms of getting them there and at that time i think there was um you know Matthew the owner would have wanted to put more investment in and keep going and feel like let's try and get the underlying performance levels to levels which we think we could compete in the Premier League at.

14:27Where we've got to in terms of third is maybe a great achievement but how do we push it beyond that? And that's where it needs an alignment between what the owner wants to achieve with the club and where the staff are and what they're believing. And that needs to be woven together and you need to get on the ground and spend a lot of time with people understanding. understanding, you know, where, not just from the top down saying, you need to do this, this and this, but also understanding where they think they can take the club, where they believe, because ultimately it's the staff and the players who need to deliver it.

14:54And then sit down and go, right, how can we take some of those ideas and then deliver it alongside this idea that we want to try and improve the metrics, the underlying metrics of our performance this year so that we can actually compete in the Premier League. ultimately Mark left and then I came in in that summer 2015 as part of a change and Rasmus Angus and the sporting director was with me at the time and we brought a new manager in and we tried to sort of evolve it and maybe try to evolve it too quick at the start maybe in terms of Go on, tell us what you mean by that Yeah, because there'd been such a fundamental change in that summer of 2015 we brought in a new coach in Marina Stajkhausen his assistant he brought a new analyst in we brought another new coach to work alongside him we brought a set piece coach in at the time as well Gianni Villa who's at Spurs now and bringing such a collection of people in and new signings as well you learn a lot from that process back in 20 years you learn a lot that you can't just throw all this together and then expect it all to work straight away you do need to spend a lot of time kind of understanding the relationships and the people and what they can deliver and how that's all going to knit together in the future and we found that when we threw it all together, it just didn't work.

16:08So we ended up changing our manager after, I think, nine league games because there was a realisation quite quickly that what we'd thrown together wasn't in that point going to take us forward and the performance networks weren't good enough underlying the team on the pitch. And how did you cope with that perceived failure? Did you see it as that or not? I think it was, in some sense, it wasn't a great start because I was an outsider to football at the time. was his first job in football and you get the feeling that people think, who's this guy coming in? Thinks he knows about football, whatever.

16:41It's disappointing that it doesn't work quite as quickly as you think and obviously Brentford had got the playoffs the previous year and that was a big success for the club and then we stopped dropping down the table there quickly and people start thinking, can this guy do it? Or maybe we need to change it again. The most important thing there, the big thing that meant that we didn't really doubt ourselves too much was the owner of this club who's just, when people talk about Brentford and where they are now and they talk about Matthew and what he's done I think they link those two things together but they don't realise how supportive he's been of the staff who've gone and delivered this over a number of years because he's rock solid in his beliefs about what he wants to do it doesn't transmit that pressure down on me or on in this case Thomas the head coach, he's just a great owner in that sense, he's not emotional he looks at things objectively he understands, he listens to what you're trying to do and so when you make a mistake he doesn't automatically react and say well that was a terrible mistake you know you should be distributing penalty or punishment for that he's like okay well these things happen let's how are we going to correct it i'd love to talk about how how he runs this place and the lessons that you know people listening to this whether they are working in a business or running a business can learn from that how often is he around how does he communicate how does he bring people on the journey with him i think this is a really interesting insight for people because he doesn't do many interviews he doesn't sit down with people like this does he no and you know he likes to keep himself to himself he doesn't do many interviews he's quite introverted in many ways as I think maybe I am a little bit as well and I speak to him on a regular basis but um but he's not he's not at the training ground very often he might come down very occasionally to watch training I think he's very comfortable letting the people run the club for him he sets out kind of some basic principles that he'd like to see you know enacted and some thoughts and ideas on football things like um how he wants us to be proactive on the pitch he doesn't want to one of his big bugbears I'll be honest is there is when you're leading 2-1 with a minute to go and everyone drops off.

18:33And he's like, no, I want to keep on attacking. I want to keep on scoring the third goal. I really want to keep going for it and keep attacking. So just some basic things like that. And he wants to make rational, logical decisions. He wants to see the evidence behind the thinking. But he's got that trust in us to deliver it, which is invaluable because it means that you can just get on with it, not feeling as if somebody's looking over your shoulder ready to kind of have a go at you because you didn't quite get it right. and we all know that as we go through many many years of running a football club you'll make loads of mistakes because we've had a few successes on players people forget all the players it didn't work out I don't forget them I remember the failures quite a lot but he's never once come to us and said you're an idiot why did we go and do that it's always been a team thing about we all bought into it we all believe it was the right idea maybe he had his doubts in one case maybe I had my doubts in one case maybe Thomas had his doubts in one case but it's never held against people to say well, you know, don't do that again because he understands that we're not all deliberately trying to make mistakes, right?

19:32And that's all great stuff, but what does he also do to push you all and drive you on and keep you honest? I'll be honest with you, I'm not sure he does a lot of that. Really? No, no, no, not in a kind of an obvious way, let's say. He's a Brentford fan, he wants the best for the club and he's just very calm and relaxed about how it's gone over the last few years. I mean, to some extent, maybe come back in a couple of years' time when maybe it's not going so well. Well, it's easy to be that sort of leader when things are going well, isn't it? Exactly. And like, yeah, exactly. But to be fair, he's never been a kind of, you know, shouting and bawling and screaming when we had those more difficult moments.

20:05He's always believed in what we're trying to achieve. So if we take like a small view, a defeat, right? Yeah. He calls you after a defeat. What sort of questions would he want answered or what would he be talking to you about? So I sit next to him most of the times for games. If we lose, but we play well, he recognises that and he'll say, well that was a really good performance we were really pleased with that I think we lost first season in the Premier League last year we lost 1-0 Chelsea and we absolutely battered in the last 20 minutes I think we hit the bar post-ball three times and we were absolutely Mendy was unbelievable and he said I think that's our best ever performance that's the best we've ever played almost really really happy because he's seen the underlying metrics are really good on that game and that's just invaluable and then there'll be sometimes when you win and you say we're lucky there we've all seen results in games where you were lucky there and you'll not and then and then there'll be maybe something that's happened here within the game like um where he feels like we didn't stick to our principles and and that's the comment you know i felt like we won but we didn't stick to our principles there we got a bit lucky he's judging it not on not on the results at all you know when you talk about a high performance environment and trying to just be better every day when your owner is so aligned to that idea and he's not judging the results himself he's judging the underlying performances and what's happening on the ground day to day, it means that actually people can be confident and actually be faithful to that belief, which I think a lot of us believe is probably the right way to go, to try and forget about the results, to try and look at the underlying performances.

21:33But there's a phrase you use there about the leader being aligned. And in our interviews where we've been lucky enough to sit down with Premier League coaches like Frank Lampard or Sean Dyche, for example, one of the things that they've identified when things have gone wrong is a misalignment between the leaders of the organization and that straight line from them down to the playing staff has suddenly become crooked. So would you take us into the process of how you keep that alignment between Matthew, yourself and Thomas? So what are the meetings? How regularly are they? What are the kind of conversations you're having?

22:12So I'll speak to Matthew on match days and on the phone now and again. I don't really have any formal meetings with him. He's not at the training ground. He's not active in running the club per se. After games, he'll speak to Thomas, I'm sure. I'm not on those calls, but I don't ever remember a situation where me, Thomas and Matthew have sat down and had a formal meeting. Right. Occasionally we might go for dinner. That's something we'll do. We'll go for dinner and we might invite one or two others with us. And that's part of a social bonding and about being part of a team as much as anything about, right, I want to say this, this and this in a formal performance way, so to speak.

22:44I will have those more regular catch-ups with Thomas. and sometimes it'll be about what I think and sometimes it'll be about what Thomas thinks and sometimes it'll be me often trying to be subtly impart what Matthew believes and often trying to sometimes be less sort of and just say look, I think Matthew wants to see us do this, this and this how can me and you go about achieving that for him or do we think that's wrong? Do we need to give that feedback to Matthew and say we don't think that's the right approach to actually solving this particular problem And he listens to that? Yeah, he does.

23:12Yeah, exactly, he does. And I think open-mindedness is an absolutely key attribute in Matthew and in Thomas as well actually as a coach. Go on, say more about that I could sit down with Thomas and have a conversation and sometimes it might be something that I know you won't necessarily agree on on all the rest of it but he would sit and listen and think about those ideas and come back with thoughtful replies, sometimes in agreement, sometimes not and we'd have a really good conversation around whether we think that's the right way to go forward or not they're willing to be open-minded i think that's a key personality trait which has enabled them to reach the the top in their in their fields so it's really interesting i'd like to delve a bit deeper into that because there's some really interesting research that was done on this in a study at john hopkins university where they looked at doctors that are sued the most versus doctors that are sued the least and what they found was that it doesn't matter the quality of advice that the doctor dispenses the difference was the length of appointment times so the more time you give somebody just a chance to speak their truth and to process it means that you tend to build stronger bonds and relationships on it so do you do this formally so when you sit down with thomas you almost say i'm just going to impart this i don't want your response or is it a little bit more natural and organic than that much more natural i never do that i never do that me and him we'll meet we're trying to have a catch-up every week but but it'll be very very informal we'll just pass each other and say oh his office is next to mine we'll pop in later we'll have 10 minutes or let's let's catch up next week we'll have a coffee or whatever but what i do do is the end of a season we'll sit down and we'll go right end of the season before you go on holiday let's make sure we sit down and have a there's a full debrief on what happened what went well what didn't go well what our targets were at the start of season did we meet them why didn't we meet them you know how are we going to improve next year that's obviously aligned to the recruitment process we go through in the summer but when i sit down and do that process it's a very very two-way process it is never right sit down with me i'm going to give you all my feedback i'm gonna tell you exactly what i think it's very much you come with your notes i've come with my notes you're going to tell me what you think i need to do better we have a very two-way process on that i think that's really healthy if it becomes dictatorial or top down when you hit more difficult moments i think it's harder to maintain that strong relationship if you feel that somebody's kind of having you know got it in for you having to go at you a little bit what kinds of targets do you set and how do you marry them up with well we're just getting better all the time you could finish 20th in the Premier League but every area of this football club could have improved so would that be success or failure?

25:49That would be success if we did everything better and finished 20th but maybe maybe four of our players got broken legs you know maybe maybe there's a we played Arsenal a couple weeks ago we scored an offside goal right I mean it can happen right there's so much human error can happen in the game so for me human nature means that we'll look at finishing 20th and get relegated as a big disappointment of course we'll be massively disappointed and upset and the players will be upset and and and all the rest of it i would probably have quite a big job to convince people being successful but in that case you certainly wouldn't want to change anything you wouldn't want to change coaches change manager whatever i would i'd hope matthew wouldn't want to change me frankly it's just so important not to get too carried away with results week to week, day to day.

26:32Will we ever exist in a world? Because I get very frustrated with the way football is viewed from the outside. That winning is successful, losing is failure. I'm probably guilty of encouraging this on the television in my other job as well, where if a team wins a game of football, we praise them. If they lose, then we criticise them. Do you hear, not just you personally, but within the whole sets about Brentford, do you have a sense of frustration with the way the game is talked about and could we all be doing more to change the narrative around football or is it just the way it is? I think it's the way it is because it's an entertainment in the day.

27:08Your job is to entertain the audience as much as the game itself and that's not sitting there saying, well, there was a bit of luck there and that was a random thing. It hits his knee but it might not have hit his knee and it hits the post. What if it had gone in? It doesn't matter at the end of the day. That's not the job of the media and the entertainment that football provides. that's my job to try and dig into the underlying narrative and actually what really is going on and what is luck and what isn't luck. Let's talk about luck then. Often people who are in a senior position like you like to tell the rest of the world that luck doesn't have a part to play.

27:43It's all their brilliant decisions and their great ideas and setting the tempo and the culture. How big a role does luck play? That's really interesting you asked that question because I had a former league one manager came to the game with me last Saturday. We played Crystal Palace at home. I have a box in the stadium, which I've got because what I like to do is I like to invite or intercept interesting people who come to the game. I get them all in the box. I think it creates a nice little environment of people meeting other people and interesting conversations go on. Sometimes we'll get a coach who's from another sport will come in and I might invite maybe a B-team coach or whatever and come and say, I've got this person, come and have a chat.

28:23I think that's an interesting way to introduce people. So anyway, last Saturday, someone who was a lead one manager until this season lost their job and obviously that sparks an interesting conversations about last season it went very well for them what happened, why was that so good and then this season it all seemed to fall apart and then suddenly they shone the door and you think from an outsider's point of view you look and think that was a bit you were the golden boy last year and then this year you're out the door and how does that happen and he asked me an interesting question after the game he said how much role do you think luck plays and I had to think and said said 80 percent 80 80 percent look I don't know what the number is but I think it's a lot higher than people already give it credit for how much luck is involved in what we see in football and how much luck plays a part in shaping results and shaping careers and shaping decisions he said yeah I used to not believe it at all but when I lost my job I was I called a few people just for some advice and guidance and they said well you know we thought about you were a bit unlucky then And he was like, oh, well, I never used to believe in luck.

29:26I used to think as a coach, you can control and manipulate everything. You want to believe that you can change everything. Everything's within your control. And I said, well, yeah, well, it's not. There's so many things, so many things that need to go right for you to be successful or can easily go wrong for things to not work out the way you want. So let me ask you this then. If that manager who lost his job last season was at this football club and had the same results last season and this season, would you have made the same decision? It's hard to say specifically yes I know that question but I think the sort of things you look at would be what changed between last season and this season and which of those factors were suddenly were in the manager's control what are you changing it for the easy decision is to change a manager but how many times do we see clubs change a manager but nothing really changes?

30:21So what you need to do then is build an environment here of growth mindset individuals, right? Yeah. How do you recruit for that? I think there's some good lessons here, hopefully, for people, again, running their own businesses who want to change the culture or want to drive a specific culture. How do you make sure you're bringing the right people in? I think having worked in football and outside of football, I think there's a lot that you can learn from both. I think the recruitment part of football is just so unbelievably important that it really drives a lot of what happens down here, both in terms of recruiting your staff and your players.

30:56So I think it's unbelievably important to think about how somebody fits in, in terms of a player, how they fit into the existing set of players. It's also important with staff to think about what personality traits and what characters and what ability do they bring to the table that fits into what you've already got in play. How do you find that out? A lot of phone calls in football, a lot of ringing people and saying, what's this person like? What do they bring to the table? and obviously what you're trying to do, so for example when you build a coaching department, you're trying to build a balanced group of individuals who have lots and lots of different attributes which work as a whole.

31:29So for example, some coaches are very detail-minded. They spend a lot of time, they're laptop coaches, they spend a lot of time working through clips and showing clips to players and thinking in the details. But maybe their personality side of it and their extrovert nature is not there. And you don't want to have a team full of laptop coaches and that's it. you'll be missing all the other important attributes about how you coach players and deliver the performance on the pitch. Same as you don't want lots of coaches who are kind of, in the classic sense, man-managers and very out there and leading people and all the rest of it, but haven't got the ability to sit down and go, right, look, in detail, this is specifically what I want us to do on the pitch and actually be able to coach that to be able to deliver a well-coached, well-organized team of individuals.

32:11So what you're looking for is people who complement each other well across the team in many different personality attributes, all of whom have the share of the belief that I've but you know it's about coaching and it's about development we can all improve and and and the interesting about football is a training ground is is fundamentally that environment or it should be that environment right it should be the environment where we're all coming here to work and improve it's actually very different if you think about a football club than if you think about another walk of life you know 90 90 percent of your time is spent doing the work and maybe 10 is spent training and learning and educating yourself and doing a course or reading a book or trying to improve what you do whereas a football club actually you know 80 90 percent of the time is at a training ground where we're all trying to learn to improve and develop and grow and 10 is actually on a saturday where you actually put that in practice and actually deliver the job on the ground so i think football in terms of a football training ground is a very much a is it should be a very much a learning learning environment and that growth mindset is important if you're coming down here not to come down here thinking i'm not here to learn and improve but actually you're here to to work and develop but you're in a fascinating sweet spot where you've worked outside of sport in the in the real world to use that term and then you've worked in elite sport as well and i think people often use that metaphor of sports teams and trying to apply it to the business world but there's a couple of fundamental differences isn't there that one you have employment law in like the real world so some of the conduct you might see in a training ground you wouldn't necessarily pass muster outside of that but also you've got contracts where you can get rid of people a lot easier in the sporting world than you can where employment law dictates that you're protected so for people listening to this that work in that real world and when they're looking to recruit people to join their journey what are the characteristics that you'd advise having worked in both that you'd say don't mistake that bit that's the key element for bringing somebody in that's going to add value to your team i think that open-mindedness I talked about before and also line to humility and I think if you if you want to be somebody who can add to a team you need to be humble enough to come to that team and feel that right I'm here to also learn there's a two-way process there and so you need to be humble as you go in I think that's that's key and I think a lot of times when when I was younger and we're in not in a football environment sometimes you can get too focused on recruiting talent and attributes things, you know, what can they actually do that the business does.

34:38So if you're developing software, can they write good software? And a lot less time is spent delving into, right, what is this person, what is this person like as an individual? Are they open-minded? Are they humble? Are they going to grow and develop? Are they going to come in and stay at the same level? Or are they going to actually be able to grow and turn into something else with us and take them to a new level individually? Or are they going to come in and we've all worked with people who maybe, you know, have attributes that you don't like, a bit lazy, a bit arrogant. You know, when you bring people into business and they're like that, you know, it doesn't matter whether it's football or anything else, you don't want to work with those people.

35:12The thing about football, I think that I've learned, is we spend a lot more time looking at those attributes just as much as some of the more technical skills. No player you buy is ever perfect, but what you're looking for is somebody who you think you can develop, especially a club like Brentford, you're never going to get the finished final player. You want to get a player who you think can develop becomes something slightly better. And that's that. humility and that open-mindedness to want to go on that process and actually develop themselves because you can't force development on them. You can't say, well, we're going to develop you.

35:41You don't have to do anything. We're just developing around you. They need to fundamentally own that. And what have you learned about dealing with people who let themselves and let you down? I guess I'm thinking more on the playing side at this point because sometimes players can get carried away with their own success, the trappings, the media interest and things. How do you deal with behaviour that isn't a standard that's expected. Coming into football as a newcomer, I didn't realise quite how young a lot of players are. These are young guys. They're immature. I mean, I don't know what time your mind probably matures.

36:13It's mid-20s, right? 24, yeah. Yeah, so a lot of footballers you're working with and the ones who are developing are all younger than that. So the question really is, have they made an honest mistake? Because we all make honest mistakes, and how do you deal with that in a sympathetic way? you know, when they've let people down. I've had it before where they've let people down. Sometimes you'll go, right, you let us down, all the rest of the years are fine. You know, that's a bit different. Another difference between football and outside world is you don't find your staff in the outside world. Here it's pretty normal, right?

36:41But I think you've got to allow for errors. You've got to fundamentally understand the motives behind mistakes. You know, was it a deliberate act of sabotage or was it just an honest mistake? And something else that comes up in sort of an aligned point, I think, in terms of recruiting people is when you recruit a player, often there'll be an analysis of the character and it'll be sometimes a bit too binary. It'll be they're a great character or they're not a great character. And you end up with this binary kind of thing. And what I've learned is that most people are never like that. Most people sit in this kind of gray area of having their faults and their strengths.

37:17And often those, in quotes, not great character traits are manageable or you can work around it if you understand that person and you can coach them. And the long time they come in and they've got that humility, you can kind of work around some of those issues. And if someone lets themselves down, do you look at yourselves and go, right, what could we have done better in this situation in terms of our support for them? Yes, 100%. So can I talk about two examples of recruitment? One young footballer, one experienced pro, Christian Eriksson, had his cardiac arrest. It's a good argument without that.

37:53he would never have ended up at Brentford Football Club, right? Pretty good argument, yeah. I think that's fair to say. So when the opportunity arises to sign someone who we all know is a world-class footballer, do you still do all of the same checks to ask whether they're a good person? Or is there a moment in any business where talent just trumps everything else and you just want that guy in the building because he's Christian Eriksson and can do amazing things with the football, regardless of, and by all accounts, he is a good guy, but if he was a toxic individual do you sometimes just forget about your values just to get the quality in the door no never that's it he's a good example thomas had worked with him years earlier in the youth age groups at denmark so going back to he knew he were inside out and and obviously being danish and with a big danish connection this club it was easy to do the research in terms of what is he like not that we needed to do much of it but had he been in some sense a bad character in that binary sense you should resist all temptation to bring them in it would be a disaster because?

38:57because I think the players around him just won't won't buy into that they'll be it'll create divisions it'll create you know football's fundamentally a team sport you need everyone pulling completely in the same direction as soon as you get divisions in there that's not great I think they can provide the wrong example to some of the young players who are learning from some of the senior pros you want your senior pros to be absolutely top professionals but then then it starts having a knock-on consequence. I think things can change very quickly in football. And so you put one bad individual, one bad egg in there, I think people underestimate how much damage that can do if you get that wrong.

39:30So that's an experienced player. And let's talk about a much younger player, obviously high profile because of his dad, Romeo Beckham, who's involved in Brentford in the B team. Would you give us an idea of how much work would go into making a decision to bring a player like that through the door? And again, at no time is it based on the name on the back of the shirt and the value that brings? No, it was interesting because going back to the first week of January, we brought a player called Kevin Sharder in. And it's a loan, but it's likely to become permanent in the summer and it'll be a record transfer for us.

40:02And the amount of media attention we got for that was absolutely zero. And about two days later, we brought Romeo in on a loan from Inter Milan for our B team. And it dominated the press. And honestly, it was like one of the most read stories that day on the websites and Twitter. It wasn't a PR stunt in any way, but I wish it had been because it was a really good one. You know, if we'd actually thought about it. But the thought that went into Romeo is, obviously, we have relationships in football. He was looking for a place to train in England because he's an inter-Miami player. So out of the season, can he come and train with us?

40:36We said, yes, of course, we'll let him train, but still fundamentally not looking past that process of it. Is he going to add to the environment as a player, but is he going to add to the environment as a character as well? what's his character like had Romeo come in and been like well I'm a Beckham that would have been a disaster for us but he's not like that at all he's he's he's also like his dad I think humble guy good work ethic good mindset wants to work extra hours on the training ground and sometimes has to be held back a little bit from that the fundamental point is it doesn't matter what whether it's an experienced pro or a young player like that the character still has to be correct I'm interested in picking up on that thing that Jake mentioned there though Phil because I'm reminded of a conversation we had with a guest on the podcast that described to us how one of the challenges he'd faced as as a manager of a team was keeping people humble when they'd had a level of success the club that he was at the players outgrew the club if that makes sense and he felt that when they started to lose that humility because they'd become established in in in the league they were in and players started to go to these other cathedrals of football and see what else was on offer that's when it started to become a little bit more difficult now i'm not suggesting you're at that level yet but if you maintain your kilometric of how do we get better next year there's a good chance that you're going to maintain and keep improving on this how have you started to anticipate dealing with that lack of humility that comes just from having constant success.

42:10You're right, at some point the bigger clubs will come and try and cherry pick some of those players. With this current group I don't expect that to be a humility issue but naturally it provides challenges with us about how we then navigate those changes because that's not happened to us yet in the Premier League this is the end of all now one and a half years in will be the end of the second year. How do we evolve the club and how do we get through to the next phase of our development keeping some of those fundamental principles in place but being able to replace some very, very good players with equally good players or players who can eventually be equally as good?

42:42How do you do it without alienating some of the players who already got you there in the first place? So I think it would be very easy to, when you go to the Premier League and suddenly there's a lot more money available, is to suddenly throw a lot more money at players and experienced players and big salaries and all the rest of it and then very aware of the challenge of doing that and then having four or five very good players who got us there turning around and going, well, hang on, we were the ones who got us there. why are we not being rewarded with the big contracts and all the rest why is it that you're suddenly throwing all this money and this belief that this new star player can come in and take us to the next level and if that player doesn't come and share that same work ethic that same humility, that same desire to improve and the rest of the players find themselves doing a lot of it a lot of his running for him that's where you'll find that the whole culture and the whole environment will just collapse in on itself and then we'll find some bigger challenges What's the key for making that progress though and bringing people on the journey?

43:34How do you do it? Is it a communication thing? Yes, it's communication. Some players won't come with us on the journey. That's natural in football. Players will move on for different reasons. But I think you've got to first focus on, like going back to the start of the conversation when I talked about first coming in here and seeing and talking to people and actually understanding what they think and what they see and they've got these new ideas, is what have we got internally? What can we take? Can we bring people on that next step with us and who is going to come on that journey with us and who is going to leave and making sure that those people feel comfortable and rewarded and highly motivated before we start augmenting that with new additions from the outside.

44:14Where did you finish in the Premier League last season? 14th. Okay, so that's your greatest ever season as a football club. Top flight, Premier League, 14th place finish. And you choose to restructure the football department. Many people wouldn't have touched it. Why did you decide to make even subtle changes? well part of it was because i i used to do this job with a guy called rasmus anchorson and he left in around christmas of 2021 so part of it was he left and that changed the dynamic and i felt that i needed more support and more knowledge i realized that what rasmus provided was you know me and him did this job together and the reason it worked so well as co-directors of football is because we were completely different people you know his skill set and my skill are completely different and him leaving provided a vacuum in terms of my knowledge around some of these areas and i felt that we needed i i needed but the club also would benefit from new skills and experiences coming in some of these areas so that was partly triggered by that also looking at myself and realizing that i can't do certain things there's certain things i'm not good at that rasmus was good at that we need other people to step up and and do um and also yeah trying to trying to reduce the number of people who reported directly to me over over time i'd kind of accumulated 100 people, loads and loads of people reporting to me.

45:29And I just felt that I needed to spread that out a little bit and actually allow other people to take on responsibilities. But that takes quite a level of self-awareness. So again, I think it's a really important area if you'd share with us about how do you go about doing that self-evaluation?

45:48I think it's a process where you sit down in a chair and go, right, I'm going to self-evaluate myself now. I think you do have to be successful. I think you do have to be very self-aware of what actually you're good at and what you're not good at. Hopefully I have some level of humility to kind of realise that. I'm not afraid to sit with people like today and say a lot of the success. I know where we were lucky and I know what was luck and what was randomness and where things could have gone wrong for us and not get carried away by that. I'm also aware of the fact that football will continue forever and ever and ever and is largely cyclical.

46:23and to maintain the high standards, you need to keep on evaluating. And I'm a big believer that you need to keep on changing things. You can't keep things the same all the time. Not just changing the squad, but little things. When we were in the championship, we didn't have, we had no money really, tiny revenues relative to the other clubs. But when the players used to come back in after pre-season, we'd do things like, I just want to see a new coffee machine. I just want to see, just change a little bit or last summer we brought in Ben Ryan. That was a change in terms of the performance director.

46:58We brought a new coach into our first team group. We just freshened it up a little bit. It's not just about players. It's about new ideas, not getting stale. You don't want the players coming in after pre-season going, all right, same players, same coaches. Eventually it starts to, you'll lose a little, I think you'll lose a little bit of kind of excitement and forward momentum that you maybe need to keep going forward, which I think you have to keep going forward. As soon as you stop, you kind of, you become a bit stale, I think. Brilliant stuff. We're going to move on to our quickfire questions in just a moment.

47:25But my sort of final one for you before we do that is like, why football? You had an amazing career before, you achieved brilliant things. What is it about football? Well, I grew up in Newcastle and you can't not love football. I used to go to the games way back when. People forget it wasn't that popular. Back in the late 80s, early 90s when I started, it wasn't that popular. But I used to go to all the games and then Newcastle became good. And when I applied to go to university, I applied at Newcastle University. And the reason was to keep my season ticket in Newcastle. So I was really born to it.

47:52And then when I left university, I was there a long time, but when I left, I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I really wanted to do something that I was interested in. So I ended up working around in the sports betting industry, which is peripheral to football, but still watching a lot of football. Because I think you've got to do something in your life which you love doing. If you're doing something that you don't love doing, what's the point, frankly? That's my view on it. The idea that I would actually work in football, and I never even tried to work in football. That was just something that came about, again, going back to luck and randomness.

48:19that opportunity opened up through i was going to a meeting um in a in my previous job which is still with the same owner of brentford it was his other business i was going to get the tube and on the platform i ran into someone i worked with who's a lawyer who um who was also getting a tube to the same meeting he was a director of brentford so it was a thing and we got talking about brentford because that was obviously the most interesting thing and we were chatting and and eventually sort of he started sort of saying well these are some of the problems we face and all the rest of and I was saying, what have you thought about this?

48:47Have you thought about this? And eventually, one thing led to another, and he advised Matthew that maybe I should be part of those solutions and actually go in there and help solve which is how I got the job. But it just goes to show you again in terms of, look, if I hadn't bumped into one of that platform, that tube station, like none of this, none of this. I've never even tried to work in football, but if you love football and you focus on the desire to work on something that you really love, hopefully hard work will meet the opportunity. Right, quick fire questions. the three non-negotiables that you and the people around you would ideally buy into hard work absolutely fundamental i bet everyone everyone who asked that i bet you 50 must say hard work first up humility and open-mindedness i talked about that in terms of that's one of thomas's big strengths that people don't see i think from the outside what's your greatest strength and your biggest weakness i think my biggest strength it can also be my biggest weakness at times, which is, I think my biggest strength is I'm quite calm, level-headed, dispassionate, and analytical, and in many ways introverted.

49:52I'm not somebody who's out there all the time and doing lots of interviews and all the rest of it. I tend to be in the background. I think that can also be my biggest weakness because, like I said, when we fail to get promoted, people want to see people going, oh, this is terrible. This is the worst thing that's ever happened. Not necessarily somebody they want to grieve and and feel that down they don't want somebody going in just calm and a bit emotionless and being a bit emotional we talked already football's an emotional sport being emotionless can be maybe also a weakness and also being introverted means that i'm sometimes reluctant to do that job of stepping in front of people in front of a whole team of people and going right this is how i see it and i don't realize sometimes that they sometimes they want that as well and realizing that when one of those moments to step in and go right here's my vision of how we want to do it and getting that balance right what does hard work mean to you not cutting corners i think natural human desire is to want to cut corners and get to the end point as quickly as possible because that's the end point but if you don't put the steps in place and the foundations in place before you get there that's where you make mistakes what's the biggest misunderstanding or misconception about you?

51:03Me, I think in general about Brentford, I think in the past it's been a little bit that we are focused completely on stats and data and all this kind of stuff. And there's so much more to it and you need such more broad skill set to actually be able to do the job. And I think that's, you know, my background is as a statistician, a mathematician, so people automatically assume, well, that's why I deliver. I come in with numbers and I say, here's the numbers, now get on with it. But actually, you know, it takes a lot more than that. We have a high-performance book club. We have many members, and they love recommendations.

51:33Would you recommend a book for our members, please? I will recommend a book. I haven't listened to all the podcasts, but I did listen to my car on the way earlier. I listened to your last one with Jordan Henson, which was fascinating, and you mentioned Kahneman. I'm going to mention that book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I'm certain you must have had that one come up in the past. The reason I mention it is because there's been two books which Matthew has given out to his staff members and gone, right, you must read this. I've read this. You must read this. When it's been fresh and new, this book's obviously from quite a long time ago, but when you read it, you went, right, read that.

52:06Boom, this is exactly the sort of thinking which I want to see in my businesses outside of football, but also bringing it into football. And there's so many concepts in thinking fast and slow about things like anchoring, things like loss aversion, things like understanding that, you know, just the biases that we all hold. You see that all the time, the biases in some of the people you work with and you see it coming out, and you think, oh, this is, you know, and it's just like a theory played out in action. Things like the process that he talks about where he was involved in recruiting potential officers in the Israeli military, and they tried to just have experts say, we observe this person, we think they're going to be an officer, and how bad that process was, how unsuccessful it was, and how that parallels youth development in football and trying to really understand is this player going to be a player or not, and how do you measure it, and can you predict it, and how hard that is.

52:54There's so many parallels between what he talks about there and what you see around football, in my opinion. What advice would you give to a teenage, Phil, just starting out? I think like a lot of young boys, it's cutting corners and they want to just enjoy their life and cut corners and the hard work's not necessarily there. I think as you get older, as you develop and become more mature, you start to realise how much effort and work you need to put in to be able to kind of do well and stay afloat almost with other good people. And the more you hang around with good people who are doing well, the more it inspires you to work harder.

53:27That idea of hard work is just fundamental. And I think teenage boys, a lot of them, my kids, the same hard work. Your final message really to our listeners who've really enjoyed this absorbing conversation, what would you love to leave them with ringing in their ears about how to live their own version of high performance? We just talked about hard work and that's fundamental. But I think humility, I think that's absolutely key, that learning process and surrounding yourself with good people. So be humble, realise your strengths and weaknesses, is surround yourself with good people who complement that but complement each other.

54:00Phil, thank you so much for your time. So good to get that insight into the humility in this place, the way you recruit people, the risks that you take, the cognitive diversity that's really important. My final question, are you a dreamer? Do you dream that there's something unbelievable around the corner for Brentford or are you more about the fact that being here today where you are in the Premier League is special enough? I don't think you can sit here and say being here where we are now especially enough because as soon as we do that I think that's where we'll start to fall backwards I think you've always got to aspire how on earth do you get to the next level look at Brighton, what a great example they are where up and even until a couple of years ago there were a team who were more struggling at the bottom end and they made some changes and they've just gone on to a level where now they're just outstanding as a football team and done it in a way which you can only you know that's an inspiration to us to kind of mimic them um am i a dreamer not really i think you've got to my job is to try and make that happen that's pragmatic but i think there is a there's certainly a space within football for and thomas talks about it you know the big dream you know could we get in the europa league that's the big dream and i think you do have to have people who are dreamers and more emotionally motivated like that to kind of want to motivate that whereas I'm more pragmatic and I've got to kind of think, well, actually, yeah, we've got to actually go and deliver it.

55:24So there's a role for both, I think. Good luck. Thank you very much.

55:32Damien. Jake. What stands out for you? I thought that was a really, really fascinating conversation. It was a privilege to listen to inside a club. I think a couple of things. One is this idea of shattering the myth that this is a club run on statistics and data, the human feel, the importance of culture. stood out and with that the humility to be open to new ideas to different ways of thinking I thought that's an invaluable lesson for all of us I sort of was just thinking while um while Phil was talking this is a place where nothing happens by accident like I love the fact that he's honest that you get luck and you get you know I work with Owen Hargreaves a lot of BT sport and he always says football's a game of chance you know someone slips over if that's chance or it rains in the middle of a match which affects the outcome, that's all chance.

56:21But actually the things that Phil's able to control, he controls, he thinks deeply about the kind of people they're bringing into the football club. I know they have a, we didn't get onto it, but they have like a no dickheads policy in this place. You know, you can't come in here and act in the wrong way and he spoke about that really well. But I think the sort of standout thing for me is that no matter how good you are, either as a coach or as a staff member or as a footballer, you do not get through the door and get a job here if you're going to upset or impact the culture in a negative way.

56:50And we've heard that from so many of our high performers. You know, Holly Tucker saying to us, she'd rather have a hole than an arsehole in her business. Sometimes people make the mistake of thinking, well, it's only one person. But the impact of only one person for the people listening to this that work in all different kinds of businesses can be huge. Yeah. And again, there was something Phil Spogbault, the stability at the club there. and that fits with that phrase that we often use of cultural architects, people that build the foundations and keep them aligned, keep them in place by their consistency, how they operate, how they deal with other people.

57:26And I think, again, it reinforces a lot of what we're hearing from so many others that this kind of stuff, the human element and engaging people is essential for high-performance teams. And engaging different people from different walks of life, with different mindsets. I think this conversation about diversity is brilliant. As you know, I spend my life kind of rallying against the fact that you have to be a certain kind of person to be accepted in the football world, and I'm definitely not that person. That's just the way it is, right? But I love the idea of getting people in a room at Brentford during a match and just learning from them all.

58:03You know, I think that Phil has such a unique approach to this job, not because he's now in the world of football, but because he was not previously in the world of football. You know, if he'd have been in the game since the day he left school or come into it as a former player, I think he wouldn't have the richness that he can bring to the job. Yeah. And again, I think that's a lesson for anyone listening to this, that he's thinking about their own world, you know, like go and explore these alternative perspectives. Go and read different books if you don't get a chance to access it. You know, the podcast is very much around.

58:36We're lucky enough to bring diverse, eclectic people into your ears every week that are sharing these insights. And I think the idea is just to keep stopping you getting myopic. There's something that in psychology they call scotomas, where you almost become blind to what you do every day. And this is about just challenging those scotomas and keeping your perspective as broad as possible. Yeah, fantastic. Listen, if I'm a Brentford fan, I'm thinking, I feel the club is in safe hands. And even if the results don't come the way that, you know, the Brentford fans and certainly Phil and Matthew and everyone else wants them to, you can be sure the processes are in place for constant improvement.

59:16And, you know, it's not always linear, right? You have to have the highs and the lows. Brilliant. Thanks, mate. Thanks, mate. So this is the time for our favourite bit of the High Performance Podcast, where we get to meet one of our listeners. And this one is somebody that I was lucky enough to me back in December 2022 in Liverpool. Palan. Nice to see you again. When we met you were telling me about this business that you and your mum were running and you came up and kindly told me about the podcast and how it had been part of your journey. It's a direct to consumer brand with my mum selling chutney.

59:53So we're just starting off with chutneys because mum's always had a strong passion for food and it's something that you know I've grown up with and I love and I want to share that with the people of the world hopefully. Right, Pallan, three non-negotiables please for the perfect chutney. For the perfect chutney it has to be the consistency so you don't want it too runny, you don't want it too thick. For me it has to be flavour. I don't mean spice or heat, I mean flavour because a lot of chutneys are overly sweet and you don't get the right flavour for the products that are in them. So mango chutneys, traditionally, you get a very, very sweet and there's no depth to it.

1:00:35And natural ingredients. So we don't want it processed. We don't want it, you know, full of chemicals. We want it to be all natural and sustainable. And that's what we like. I'm interested in the bit about running the business with your mum. Yes. Very challenging. I remember you telling me in Liverpool to tell us about what some of the challenges about going into business with your mum. have presented for you yeah so mum is very you know cooking is what she loves to do she loves to feed people um and she's very opinionated on everything so the brand the way we're going to sell the chutneys the way she's doing things in particular and i'm very systematic in my approach when just because that's how i am with the agency you know i want to have things done by this day and make sure we have enough preparation and everything goes into it whereas mum's just a bit more okay today i'll make this chutney for example she did a chili a chili pickle and i said to mom you can't do that we've not got it shelf life tested and she's used our jars for this chili pickle that we can't even sell she's creative when it comes to the kitchen well i'm thinking more from the business point of view how do we get this to market quicker how can we produce more chutneys because at home at the moment we've done all the certificates and everything but i'm trying kind of get the more business aspects to where she just wants to cook and feed people.

1:01:56So what's the future plan? Tell me how you're balancing the process and focusing on the process of making the product great, but also having that big ambition or that big dream or, you know, selling 10 ,000 units or being the number one chutney in the UK. How are you getting that balance right? It's a tricky one, to be honest, because this is not a project for me to make money. I know as bad as that sounds. from a very young age mum always whispered to me that she wanted a cafe and as I've been growing my business and doing this I've just thought okay it's very unrealistic that I could spend 100 grand to fit out a cafe and do a kitchen restaurant so I thought how can I prove the concept so for me this is just proving the concept and almost trying to give mum a bit of an income stream for what she loves to do which is cooking and it's the easiest way for me to do it that that's the reality with mama seeds is that making the chutneys is a more cost-effective way of giving mom that outlet where she can cook and earn some income from it if it goes explosive brilliant i'm not planned for that and like if that happens i will take that on but for now it's just to get mom out there and get her into a business where she's passionate about she can enjoy and touch wood through the relationships i've built over time we've already got an opportunity to sell it at the Shakespeare North Playhouse.

1:03:15I don't know if I can mention that yet. Absolutely, mate. I want queues outside the Shakespeare North Playhouse after this. Yeah, it's a brilliant venue. So it's the only Shakespeare theatre outside of London, and it's in our hometown of Prescott. And that is an opportunity that through networking for Sood, my main business, that is presenting itself to me and direct-to-consumer brand online. I had a few food blogs back in the day when I was growing Sood. I've made a lot of good connections with food influencers who are all ready to sort of promote the product for me so it's just the balance of you know giving it to mom as a business she can work on and she's passionate about and if it does go explosive we'll cross that bridge when it gets there I'm excited for you Palin thank you so much for joining us mate and very best of luck and I just love that there's these amazing dynamic entrepreneurs out there doing their thing and you know in the background high performance is just playing a small part yeah thanks Palin Take care, guys.

1:04:12I love having these conversations on the podcast. I love hearing from the high-performance listeners. I love bringing someone to you that maybe you haven't heard of or heard from before. You know, there'll be many, many people, tens of thousands of people listening to this episode today who didn't know Phil Giles' role in the incredible change at Brentford Football Club over the past few years. But I really hope that that's given you an insight you didn't previously have. And especially for you Brentford fans. You know, I have this constant frustration that football clubs don't tell us enough about what they're doing.

1:04:43You know, they like to keep everything to themselves. And then they wonder why the world makes up stories about what's going on. You know, this is a great lesson. If you're a manager, a player, an owner, a director of football, and you're involved in the game, come on this podcast and tell your truth. Because everyone is just trying to do their best. They might be making mistakes, but they almost always have best intentions. And I think to hear someone talk in a way that Phil has is fantastic. So thank you to Brentford for opening up. Thank you to Phil for coming on here and sharing so much with us.

1:05:11And of course, huge thanks to you, as always, for growing and sharing this podcast. Listen, thank you so much for listening. Remember, there is no secret. It is all there for you. So keep chasing those world-class basics. Don't get high on your own supply. Remain humble, curious, and empathetic. And we'll see you very soon.

1:05:37Thank you.