Navigating the Complex World of Global Sports with Jonny Gray

Speaker A: Match fixing is very sophisticated now. It's international organized crime. Get involved. The approaches to athletes can be very subtle. It can be dressed up as a sponsorship deal. We'll give you some money, sponsor you, and then gradually it's, well, would you mind, you know, losing the first set but play the rest for real. And all of that. And some cultures, some environments, some jurisdictions, you know, these are, uh, grayer, uh, areas and perhaps in rules based democracies like the UK and the US

Speaker B: welcome to from the Top with Chad Hesters, the podcast for CEOs, founders and decision makers looking for a straightforward perspective on issues facing global leaders. No fluff, no jargon, just real conversations with people who've made tough calls and are here to share what they've learned. Here's our host, Chad Hesters. Well, hello everyone, and welcome back to from the Top with Chad Hesters. I'm your host, Chad Hesters, and I'm excited today to be joined by Johnny Gray. Johnny's a senior global sports executive and advisor. He's had quite a career and to be frank, I think he's had one of those careers that was a whole lot like T. Lawrence or any of these other sort of renaissance men that we read about in history. I'll let Johnny tell you a little more about that. But we're going to have a discussion today about what it looks like to lead in a highly complex and risky environment of global sports. And I'm really excited about to hear Johnny's views on the matter. I think sports, I don't care where you live or what sport you're interested in, it is more complex than it used to be. I think is an understatement. And we're going to get Johnny's input on that. And I, uh, hope maybe he'll share some stories from his past in there. But Johnny, thanks for joining us today.

Speaker A: It's great to be here, Chad. Love to see you again.

Speaker B: Well, good. So maybe we'll just start off. Can you give us the thumbnail sketch of your career and what brought you to this point in your life?

Speaker A: Well, thanks, Chad. And it's good to be on your podcast and sport. I mean, it's funny, I didn't really set out ever to be in sport or work in sport. I think when I was young I didn't really, like many young people, really know what I wanted to do. And a number of friends of mine from school had joined the military and they all seemed to be having really good fun. This is in the early 80s and I enjoyed Activity and travel and challenges and things like that. So I thought I'd join the military and lucky enough to be accepted, I went to train at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which is sort of the American West Point if you like. And I had a great 21 years in the infantry. I was the infantry in the UK in those days. Used to reroll every few years. I worked in light infantry in mechanized infantry. And I lastly commanded my regiment as an air assault regiment and ended up commanding in Iraq in 2003-4. Mostly in 4. Traveled the world, did a lot of operations in those days. British army was preoccupied with Northern Ireland. I spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland doing various different jobs, commander at each level, platoon company and battalion level. I worked on the staff there. I was lucky enough to work in the Ministry of Defence in Whitehalls with equipment to the Pentagon if you like. I did three tours there on strategic planning and so on. So I had a brilliant career. But there comes a point after you've commanded the regimental level in the British military, either stay on and do the whole nine yards or you know, that's your chance in your early 40s to make that career change. And for a variety of reasons I thought I would do that. I went into consulting and initially in London and then later I moved to the US in about 2008 running our consulting delivery. This is risk consulting business to business risk consulting. And it's really during that I started to get involved in sport in London. In 2005 the London was awarded the rights to host the 2012 Olympics. And on the day that that happened there were some terrorist attacks in London. So my firm got involved and I led a project which started in 2005 really to sort of design at the architectural level. It was going to be largely a new build, the London Olympics design out the terrorism risk if you like. Started getting involved in sport there and then moving to the US More and more I liked it. There were market opportunities there and I sort of got more and more involved in it to the extent that eventually I couldn't do both my day job which running the sort of sales and marketing divisions of controllers in the Americas and this. So I became the first full time head of sport for Contreras, relocated back to London and we were doing various bits of work with FIFA after the scandals and so on and that was all great. And then the headhunters call as they do and it's great to be talking to you Chad, because this is your world. But the headhunters called and Tennis had gone through, professional tennis had gone through some challenges with match fixing and integrity challenges in the sport. And they wanted to, as a result of a review they commissioned, they wanted to implement that review. And part of that was setting up a new regulatory body for the sport of tennis worldwide. And I was selected to do that and be the first chief executive as a sort of change management. I think they wanted a consultant. There's a lot of change management to do that. So I did that for a few years and then it got to steady state and I think became obvious that probably a regulatory lawyer should take it on. I moved back to consulting to a different company, a company called Ankura American Company, an expert services and advisory firm. And they wanted a sports practice because, you know, a lot of their work was for law firms and law firms, for reasons will probably come on to had set up sports practices. So I set up a, with a colleague of mine who I've worked with before, we set up a sports practice in Ankura and I did that full time and now I'm a uh, portfolio worker. I still work with Ankura, but I also work with Howden, the big insurer with their sports and entertainment division. I'm working as the bid monitor of the UK bid to host, host the Women's World Cup 2035 and a few non executive appointments in sport, both on the regulatory side and elsewhere. So still keeping very busy. But it's been a fantastic journey. We all love sport, or most people love sport. So to end up towards the twilight of my career, working full time in sport, doing lots of change, setting things up, helping companies change, buy, merge, acquire, manage risk, manage regulatory challenges, that's really been what I find myself doing. And um, it's been a great journey and still got a way to go.

Speaker B: It's certainly an interesting journey, Johnny. And what's amazing to me is you had a legitimate full career with the British military and could have just hung it up and do whatever British gentlemen do in the countryside, right, for the rest of perpetuity. But instead you recreated yourself on something you thought was interesting and complex and have built a whole second career around that. And I think for our viewers, the thing that's most important, I think, uh, I want to emphasize here, is that Johnny spent his entire career thinking about risk, whether it was on the battlefield or it was on a football pitch or Olympics or wherever. And that's what we want to get to today. This is a podcast about leaders and what they've dealt with and hearing from their perspective and maybe we can all learn something on the back end of this that will help us be better leaders or at least some context to the world we live in. And so, um, with that, Johnny, I'm a huge sports fan. Lots of sports. In fact, I could probably sit down and just turn on the television and if it's Olympic, you know, ice curling or whatever, I'll get super invested in it, you know, at the moment. But it seems to me, as a bit of a novice, that sports have just gotten more complex and there's more regulatory environment around it, and there's always been hints of corruption around sports, but it just feels there's a lot more going on nowadays. Can you, for the just benefit of us, you know, amateurs out here, can you give us an overview of your perspective on global sport and from a risk management standpoint, like, what are leaders dealing with on a daily basis?

Speaker A: It's fascinating, Chad. It's very interesting. You just used the word amateur there. And I think, just to set the context before I delve in and answer the question, sport, of course, if you go back to its roots, was an amateur activity. You know, you go back a century or more. Go back to the ancient Greek, uh, games, Olympic Games, so on. It was an amateur thing, and people did it, by and large, in their space, time. And great. What, of course, has been happening over several decades now is that money has come into sport, and money's come into sport because people want to watch it. And so they want to watch it, by and large, live. So it's about the only thing that people watch live now on television. So money comes in in the sense that, you know, there's television rights. There's therefore, if people are watching it, there's advertising rights. And in addition to the sort of pure revenues from sort of spectators arriving, buying a ticket to watch it and so on. So a lot of money has come in, and that has put the sort of amateur nature, uh, of the sport under a lot of pressure. Some sports have long gone fully professional, the NFL, English, soccer, football and so on. But you still see these pressures. You see it now in the NCAA with name, image and likeness issues coming up and money coming in to the college athletes there. And that's a journey. The Olympics, of course, is still technically an amateur thing, but reality that those days are pretty much gone in many cases as well. So with money, in many ways, that's great, but it fuels the sport, it pays the athletes. They can make a living. Some make a very handsome living out of it, but with it comes other Challenges that those can be. People want to bet on sports. So uh, betting has become enormous and the deregulation in the US by the Supreme Court a few years ago now, of course it's opened up that in the US it's been that way for some years in Europe. And with betting comes match m fixing those sort of challenges with coaches and athletes come safeguarding issues and then regulators fall because you then need to regulate these things. So regulators, sports largely regulate themselves but they set up structures to do that. So a lot of regulatory activity in England now we've got the first statutory independent regulator of English football. English soccer just started up, professional soccer. So governments even beginning to get involved in regulating sport. So it's become incredibly, if you like, complex. And add to that that sport is obviously still competing for attention, the attention economy as we call it, it's competing for attention with other things. You know, there's online gaming and online gaming and sport largely sort of, you know, there's a bit of morphing going on there. It's competing for attention with streaming and entertainment and pop concerts and all other forms of entertainment. And all of those things now begin to blur as well. So absolutely fascinating time for sport in this transition. And there's a tension there, we see it all the time between the commercial imperatives and the athletic, if you like, purity. So big conversations in Europe now about the over scheduling of football with rights holders, people who earn the rights to hold events, wanting to hold more events to generate more money, but it's the same players and how much can they play and what's reasonable to ask them. So you then have athletes starting to form unions and other things and, and all that. So really interesting times, Chad. And of course as you say, all of that throws up risk.

Speaker B: Well, that's complex and they're entirely inappropriate questions probably for this podcast, but I'd love to go down at some other time maybe about the like how viable match fixing actually is in today's environment. How about this, I'll ask you one question here. If you feel uncomfortable answering it, great. But I mean my perception is it's, it'd be really hard to fix a professional sports match, whether it's British SOCCE or NFL. Um, I don't mean sort of the lower level leagues or whatnot, but is the regulatory and the anti corruption construct around the sports these days, is it pretty robust? I mean it'd be hard to do something like that.

Speaker A: It's a good question. So match fixing is not hard to do. Whether you can persuade People to fix a match is really the question. And by and large, and obviously I know this, particularly when it comes to tennis, because it was my role as the chief executive of the International Tennis Integrity Agency, the body that we helped set up, was to really stamp down on this. But where you have sports where the majority of players are not paid very well. And so if you take tennis as an example, there are thousands, tens of thousands of professional tennis players, but very few of them make a living out of that. They all have to do things on the side of the coach or they do other, they have other jobs or they're young and it's the bank of mum and dad or whatever. But it's not until you get to the very top of that pyramid that you're making this sort of money that most amateur people who watch turn on the US Open, see the players there making the very top of the pinnacle there. So people further down are very susceptible to being approached. And match fixing is very sophisticated now it's international organized crime. Get involved. The approaches to athletes can be very subtle. It can be dressed up as a sponsorship deal. We'll give you some money, sponsor you, and then gradually, or would you mind losing the first set, but play the rest for real. And all of that and some cultures, some environments, some jurisdictions, you know, these are a lot grayer, uh, areas than perhaps in rules based democracies like the UK and the US So fixing is very easy. And especially in sports like racket sports, where every point resets the odds. So in a single tennis match, there are hundreds of different changes in the odds and betting opportunities. And you can literally bet on somebody losing one game within a set or losing a set. So the whole match doesn't need to be fixed. It can just be what we call spot or spot fix in the match. And that applies in football. People are betting on how many yellow cards there are in a match. Well, it's quite easy for a player to kick somebody a little bit hard and get a yellow card. Very difficult to detect that. Likewise, it's very difficult to detect whether that player lost that game of tennis in what is 1v1. So 50, 50, probably if they're matched well, it's very difficult to say, well, they lost that on purpose. So it's a very sophisticated setup. It's coming to the U.S. i would say the U.S. has done quite well here because you didn't have that betting environment. And I'm not blaming the betting industry for it, but betting, the more volume there is in betting, the easier it is to hide the bets on the fixed aspects of it. And there's probably 1%, less than 1% of games are in some way manipulated. So it's a small amount, but the volumes can be very large. If you can spread your bets globally below the thresholds that trigger alarms and the betting companies, there's a lot of money to be made. So betting and match fixing, big problem. Is sport on it? Yes. I mean, certainly tennis took the steps it took and spends a lot of money on this. Other sports as well. Our police forces and law enforcement agencies really invested in this. I think that's a moot point. Many of them think this is a pretty victimless crime. It's always transnational. The match is in Egypt, the bets were placed all over the world. The match fixers are, uh, in Albania. And the two players, one was, was Kazakhstanian, another was South African. I mean, if you're the Egyptian police force, tough to get started with that. So it's a, uh, really tough phenomenon, but it's part of sport. And I think there's an interesting question, you know, is this just like retail and this is shrinkage? You know, this is just shrinkage. And it's just 1%. It's just part of the game. And to what extent can you ever get rid of it? Maybe not. So how do you contain it? How do you make sure it doesn't infect the higher levels? The higher levels aren't too affected by this. If you're an NFL player or a Premier League footballer, I mean, you're making so much money, your challenge is what to do with it, to be frank. So somebody who offers you some money in a bar to fix the game, you're probably not that interested. The challenge flips there, if you like, at the top of the pyramid across most sports. The challenge flips the doping, an enhancement of athletic ability where the difference between coming first and second is a split second and, um, millions of pounds there. The temptations are different.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting. You know, one of the themes that keeps coming up on this podcast is the advent of technology. And we get better technology, but it creates a whole new set of problems. And you apply that to the concept of sports betting. You're 100% right. I mean, all the, uh, sports betting's changed a lot from 20 or 30 years ago. You had your local bookie or something that people would use to place a bet with. And now it is super advanced, cloud based, and you can bet on the incremental events that may or may not happen in a, uh, competition. So the demographics of this podcast continue to be people in leadership positions and which is really interesting group to be speaking with. So let's talk a little bit about leadership in the world of sports. I mean, this is sort of a softball question here, no pun intended, but what kind of leadership skills and competencies do you think are important nowadays if you're going to be a leader in the world of sport, whether it's on the regulatory side or even in management of global sport? What kind of competencies you think are required to be able to even operate in this pretty volatile and ever evolving world?

Speaker A: Leadership, Chad. I mean, blimey, this is one of the greatest areas of human endeavor, isn't it? And so many books have been written about it and so many people think about, I know as headhunters, search agents, you spend a lot of time thinking about this. So everybody's got a theory and mine is only worth as much as, you know, anybody else's. But I think, you know, I was lucky you and I share this. My grounding of, uh, leadership was in the military. And I think you learn in the military something which I think in civil society has got a bit confused in recent years. And that is what I would say is the difference between management and leadership. So management to me is the process of managing resources and programs and technical aspects. And I'll come back to the competencies to answer your question. Uh, leadership is about people. Leadership is about inspiring people to come into work every day and do more than perhaps they would want to do or to do something, to act in a way that is about the team, about the organization as much as it's about themselves. And I think people. And if I can dwell on leadership, whether that be in the military or in my commercial roles, and as you know, I ran quite big teams in certainly my commercial life. I think people want to be inspired. I think they want a leader, uh, who sets very clear goals and ah, makes everybody understand what their role is, what they're uh, part of the plan is in delivering those goals and encourage them and supports them, lets them get on with it to an extent, but checks in and allocates the resources to management that allocates the resources to help them achieve their goals. And I think leadership is almost sector agnostic, I think perhaps different leadership styles and different industries. But I think all people who work want good leadership. And I've tried to be a good leader. I'd been obviously reporting to people, some of whom I thought were good leaders, to be frank, Others I thought were just managers. And um, I responded better to the people who brought me in, inspired me, gave me a real sense of mission, purpose and design, and then allowed me, gave me the resources and the tools to do the job. So to answer your question about sport, I think sport, again, we've got to differentiate between what I would call on the field sport and uh, I can't really talk to that. You know, what does the coach of an NBA team need to do to win in the postseason? You'll need to get another guess for that. But in the business side of sport, I think in terms of management skills, I talked earlier on about, if you like, this convergence between entertainment and sport. And I think anybody working in sport now needs to be very commercially savvy. That might not have been the case some time ago, but they certainly need to be now. They need to understand, if you like, the drivers of commercial success, the regulatory frameworks, the compliance requirements of those and a range of other sort of business P and L type functions. But I still think they also need to be a good leader. And it's quite easy in sport to become quite toxic because is a performance business, you've got to win often. The commercial side is not responsible for that, for reasons I talked about earlier on. So you can be doing really well, making great commercial decisions, but if you fail to get into the playoffs, the commercial side can unravel pretty quickly and that can lead to real toxic problems and blame cultures and all that. And I think leaders I see who succeed on the commercial side understand that sport is different, that it is based on the outcome on the pitch, on the field, if you like, or whatever field of play that is. And that is just part and parcel of being in the leadership, if you like, on the business side of the sport, which is different, I suppose in many ways. I think the reason I've liked it is because if you go back to the military, the enemy have a say in things. They have a say on whether your plan is going to work. So you can have a great plan, but as we used to say, no plan survives contact with the enemy. And sport's similar. You can have a great plan that you're going to become the best sort of club or league or regulatory body or whatever. But what happens when the whistle blows can change that. And the ability to be flexible, great principle of war, flexibility, adaptability, all of that I think are essential in a modern leader in sport and not to take it personally. And if you don't make the playoffs, not your fault. Now do you sack your coach? Well, all these questions come into play, but I think the parallels, and there are, you know, there have been certainly in the uk, a lot of leaders in sport who have come from a military, a military background, certainly in things like the British Olympic Committee. People who've run that in the past have been former military people. And I think it does translate quite well.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting, your comment about stakeholders in sports. It's interesting. As a business leader, you know, I have a lot of stakeholders to manage, but my stakeholders don't, like, riot in the streets and burn vehicles if my team or, um, some business decision I make doesn't work out. And in the world of sport, it's a super emotional, intense connection that the business entity of the team or the league has with these stakeholders that are people watching in a pub and, well, really anywhere in the world. And those viewers, those fans, those stakeholders, they feel there's an obligation to them that leadership has. And I'm sure we could come up with one, but I don't know another environment in the world these days where that's the case. And so I wonder, that means that your leadership team has to be resilient. They've got to make it through. In a world where you lose one game and people are calling for your head, whether you're the coach or the general manager or whatever it is, or even it's by halftime and you're down by one goal or something, there is a group of people online nowadays that are just how terrible the leadership team is of this organization. Also, it's interesting to note that all you have to do is win a game and all of a sudden you're the best. Right. So I guess there's a question in there. It seems to me that if you're going to be a leader in the business side of sports, you have to be resilient and you've got to build resiliency in your management team. Any thoughts on that concept or how you would even do that in an organization?

Speaker A: Yeah, I, um, mean, you're right. I think sports are very attractive thing for people to work in. It's sexy, it's fun. You know, you're going to be popular at dinner table if you're running a big sports franchise or whatever. And that's great, but I think with it comes the reality that you're going to work a lot of weekends. As we talked about earlier on, you are not ultimately in control. It's not like you can determine what's going to happen because the Whistle blows things change. So it's not for everybody. And I think where you see challenges is when people struggle with that. So building resilience, having a flexible mindset, having a clear vision of where you want to go, but accepting that the road to get there is not probably the one that you set out on. You're going to take deviations, you are going to have setbacks along the way. I think for a leader in sport those are really important characteristics to have. And I'm not saying, and ah, I'm not arguing that military people would necessarily always make good leaders in sport, but you're sort of used to that idea that you're trying to get to Berlin to end World War II. You're not just going to drive that, you're going to have setbacks, you've suddenly had the battle of the bulge. You weren't expecting it. So you've got to adapt, you've got to uh, reorganize, you've got to push forward. And so that type of mindset I think plays well in sport, maybe more so than in other industries. And then normal general good leadership traits, as we talked about earlier on distinguishing those from management, I think that's also as important in sport, perhaps more so than in other sectors. You may not have to be a great man, a uh, leader to run a automotive assembly plant. That might be more of a management function, but certainly in sport leadership's more important perhaps than in other areas.

Speaker B: So Johnny, you were just talking about leadership and management and I think another aspect of sport that might make it challenging to be a leader in is by definition global sports is built around a cult of personality or personalities. Right? You've got big stars that command lots of attention and money and kids around the world look up to sports athletes and uh, I mean what do you think it's like leading like some of your clients? Like maybe the question I'm trying to get to is what's the personality like of somebody who's a leader in a global sports organization when they're having to manage these larger than life like superstars? It feels like it's this extra complexity that we don't really have in the typical business world. Is it a factor or are they able just to kind of stay behind the scenes, let the stars be the stars and they manage the business, you know, in just a high quality way?

Speaker A: Yeah, well look, I think I uh, explained my career. I've not had to manage personally those sorts of people. So you know, I've interacted with them in a Regulatory sense, you know, and then, yeah, look at, I mean, when you become a top player in any sport, you have a lot of different personalities in play. And so like any team, as I said earlier, that on the field, the coach or the football manager, he's got to manage all of those personalities. I still think that it comes back to leadership. It's about making those players understand that they are part of a team, they're part of something bigger and they have a role to play in that team. And by and large, there is no particular room for prima donnas and exceptionalists. Now that will differ a little bit. I mean, if your striker, uh, in a football team, a soccer team, you know, you want your striker to be a little bit selfish because you want them to take the shots and score the goals. You know, if they pass it every time because they're being, uh, overly sort of generous to the colleagues, not quite what you want to happen. So you need to manage all of that. But yes, I mean, you're right, some of the players in English football, and I know a lot about English football from a regulatory point of view with some of the work that I've been doing, they are earning enormous sums of money and with that comes with some of them, you know, a sense of entitlement and so on. But I think a good coach who's successful has come up, normally has come up either a former player and they understand the locker room, or they come up through the system and they've manage and been successful at managing those personalities to ultimately produce a team outcome. Uh, so we're back to leadership. I'm using the word manage and I should be using the word leadership if I'm making my distinctions correct here, that you're leading that team, you're the coach, but you're the leader and you're creating, as you would do with a platoon of soldiers, you're creating this idea that we've got different roles within the platoon, but we have a mission. We're all trying to achieve that mission together. And I think those same principles would be the ones you're adopting in a team now. Individual sports, slightly different, obviously. Uh, my experience in tennis was with oftentimes players who are very self centered and what have you. And there you're trying to, and I'm talking now from a regulatory point of view. You're trying to help the player understand that we're trying to protect the sport, their sport, their livelihood from bad actors and that we need the help to do that. And I think again, if you engender people into the sense of collective ownership and responsibility. Even in an individual sport, you can foster that sense of mission and purpose that, as I say, I think most people want.

Speaker B: But I like your comment earlier about the good leadership might be a sector agnostic. Well, it sounds like it applies anywhere. Well, hey, I know we're kind of coming up on the end of our time here, but somebody like you that's had. Had the career path you've had. I can't let you get this call without asking the question of have there been any particular moments in time where there was an event or like an inflection point in your leadership journey? Were there any kind of aha. Huh? Moments, or was there a specific event as a young leader or even last week that may have occurred that were important? I think one of the things our listeners seem to appreciate is we bring real people onto this podcast that have real stories, and not all the stories are great ones that comment on triumph and success, but kind of lessons weren't. Is there anything that you could share with us, Chad?

Speaker A: By my advanced age, there's a lot of Scottish. Some are literal and others figuratively. I suppose the thing I learned where I probably made some assumptions that were not the case, was for all the good that the military does in breathing and training. You get more training as a leader in the military than you do in any other walk in life. So you're trained to the nth degree, staff college, this course, that course. But by and large, when you arrive, I remember arriving to, you know, take over command of my battalion in the middle of operations, the battalion's on a mission. You come in, you're the new guy. By and large, everyone's going great. There's the new guy, you know, wonder what he's like. But. But we're all going that way. I think what I learned in civil society is that when you are, uh, parachuted in to take over the leadership of a team, be this in sport or in consulting, I definitely, I think, made the mistake that I would just arrive and everyone would go, right, boss, what are we doing? And the reality is that that is not, certainly in my case, not always the case. I think there's a lot of people because, you know, look, I think, think if I characterize my career, you, uh, mentioned risk. I think the other word is change. Is that everything as a consultant, everything I've been about, even in Harrison Sports, setting up new organizations, you know, that is about change. The military is about changing outcomes. You want to do something, and you have to change the status quo, uh, in some sense. So not everybody wants to change. Not everybody has bought into change. A lot of people see change as threatening. I see as exciting. But the reality is that change will mean that perhaps some jobs are going to go or other people are going to come in over people, or all these dynamics are going on. And I think perhaps my mistakes, I've made many that if you were looking at, perhaps the major lesson would be when you come into an organization as a new leader, uh, do not assume everybody is just bought into whatever it might be. The board have said, well, we're going to do X and we're going to merge with Y company, and these things are going to happen. But not everybody's going to be happy about that. And I think taking some time to work out, uh, what all these dynamics are, uh, what are the issues in play, what are the agendas people have. People might be disappointed because they wanted the job and you've been brought in. So they're disappointed at best. At worst, they're going to actually maybe agitate against you a little bit. Taking time and effort to understand that and then trying to bring people with you as much as you can, but also having, if you like, the steel to let people go. If they're not going to eventually, having been given every opportunity, if they're not going to take part in what's happening, then they need to move on and be able to do that in a way that is constructive to the overall picture. All of that is really difficult. And, um, I've been put into positions numerous times in my professional career after the Merchant, where you're put in charge of a new organization or a new team, or you're coming into an old situation. And I've learned over time, just before you rush in, just work out what's going on. And it might not be, with all due respect to the headhunters, it might not be quite what they told you it was going to be. So doing your diligence, working out what's going on, understanding the levers you can pull, and, uh, bringing people forward is definitely a lesson I've learned along the way. In some cases the hard way.

Speaker B: That's a good word, Johnny. And I think it probably will resonate with a lot of people.

Speaker A: Well, good.

Speaker B: Look, I really appreciate you being our guest here on from the Top, and we probably could have spent a few hours going through your background here, but I know you have your own podcast and you're out there doing your own thing for a while. If our viewers and listeners wanted to learn more about you or catch up on your own view of the world a little bit more, how would they do that?

Speaker A: Well, I think most people are on LinkedIn these days. I certainly am. So, Johnny Jo h j o uh, n n y b spel in the show notes correctly, I'm sure. Great. GRA y love to hear from people. I said I'm on a portfolio of things now at this stage of my career, and some things end, so there's always opportunities to take new things on. So if anybody wants to talk about that, I'm all ears. Very interested in change and growth and all that, uh, in sport in particular. So happy to chat to anybody about those sorts of things. Chad, thank you.

Speaker B: Thanks, Johnny. I wish you were coming up here on the holidays and this is when we're recording. This is before the end of the year here. So I wish you and your family all the best. Thanks for making time for us and looking forward to a, uh, successful 2026.

Speaker A: Pleasure. Thank you, Chad.

Speaker B: If you're ready to make better leadership decisions and avoid the costly ones, subscribe to from the Top with Chad Hesters on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, thanks for listening.