Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Carol Shanahan OBE, co-founder of Synectics Solutions, the software company countering fraud and financial crime and co-owner and chair of Port Vale Football Club. Carol’s love for the football community began aged nine, where she’d go by herself to all the home matches to support West Bromwich Albion. Having left school without any qualifications, Carol nevertheless gained a job as mainframe computer operator at the age of seventeen, later meeting fellow IT worker and future husband and business partner, Kevin, and co-founding Synectics Solutions with him in 1992. When Synectics and their 350 staff moved to Burslem in Stoke-on-Trent, next to Port Vale stadium, Carol fell in love with the area, supporting the community by starting a holiday programme, then the charity The Hub Foundation, providing children and their families with food and activities. And in 2019, believing that to really help the community, they should try and transform its struggling football club, Carol and Kevin bought Port Vale FC with the aim, as she said, of “bringing back the pride, positivity and purpose.” Not often I meet someone who’s been in the world of business, is in the world of business but is also a football fan, with all the lunacy that goes with that. Welcome.
Carol Shanahan
Thank you. Pleased to be here.
Eliott Moss
Let’s go back a little bit. The, your childhood and supporting football, how did it get into the blood of Carol?
Carol Shanahan
Because I was born in Lincolnshire and, in 1957, and in ’63 when I was six, my mum left and when I was eight, I went to live with her but my dad said I could only go and live with her if she went back to West Bromwich, which is where her family had originated from because in 1963, you didn’t have the number of single parents that you have now and he felt that she needed the support of a family around her. And the job that she got was as the secretary to one of, a doctor who was one of the Albion doctors and we lived above the surgery on the Birmingham Road and so I would just wonder down, as a nine and ten year old girl, and now in retrospect I look at it and I think it’s because I missed my dad and it was a way to sort of connect with my dad because you couldn’t go online, there wasn’t the communication that there is now and so I just used to go and I’d go in the public road end, I never went in the, you know the side, I was behind the goal and I was there and some bloke would sort of lift me up onto one of the, the barriers so I could see and, and I just absolutely loved it and if the Albion played away, I’d catch the 79 bus and I’d go and watch the Wolves or I’d catch the 74 bus the other way and I’d go and watch, watch the Villa, because to me it was that sense of belonging, that sense of purpose and being there and you all won together, you lost together and now when I, you know I look at the terraces, I always say that there’s two social levellers, there’s you know your religious areas so, you know wherever you go to for your faith, you are all the same and it's the same in a football stadium, when you all sit on the terraces, it doesn’t matter who you are, you all sit there together and you know talking to the Lord-Lieutenant of Staffordshire, Ian Dudson, and he’s a Stoke supporter, for his sins, and he is a season ticket holder and it was years that he’d been sat you know behind somebody who was a season ticket holder and this chap turned round one day and he says, “You’re someone you are, I’ve seen you on the telly, you’re someone” and he says, “Who are you?” and he said, “I’m Lord-Lieutenant of Staffordshire” and he said you know he was bit concerned because he didn’t go there as that, he went there as a fan and I said did it change anything and he said, “No, just every now and again he’d go ‘seen you again’”, you know so there was this, this connection to them which was bigger than the social connection outside and suddenly, this person had a connection to the Lord-Lieutenant of Staffordshire which he would never have had in virtually any other social situation so, it can do that, when we’re there it doesn’t matter who we are, we are a Vale fan, we are an Arsenal fan, whatever you know however you take your football, that’s what you are.
Eliott Moss
And that sense, and I think that’s a brilliant articulation of what it is if you look at a football crowd and you look at the people following their team, it is about belonging to something. For you obviously, family then was, was split apart and like you said mum left and so on and so forth, do you think that’s been a fundamental, defining part of who you are and what you’ve striven to do in your life?
Carol Shanahan
100% because I had this sort of split life where my dad would come and fetch me and I’d go and have holidays in Lincolnshire, very, very rural, I mean we’re just you know a few miles in from the coast, you know you only go to that area if you’re passing to go to Skegness or you know somewhere on holiday, you know it’s so remote and then you come to West Bromwich and you know and I came to West Bromwich in ’63 and it was diverse culturally, I mean you know so for me that was just, I remember the bus stop because I used to have to catch the bus all the way through West Bromwich to get to school because my mum says I’ve got to go with my cousins you know for some reason, so I did, but I remember being outside this shop and it was an Asian shop and you could smell all of the spices and all these things, that hadn’t hit Lincolnshire you know and having this sort of, this independence, I mean I have to fess up because I have done many times, one of my biggest talents at that point was truancy, I was so good, I was ridiculously good, they are transferrable skills as far as I’m concerned because I would go and get my mark at school and then I would go and catch the bus to Dudley and I’d go to Dudley Zoo and I’d wait till a school party was going in or a family or something and I’d just sort of hook myself on the back, get in and then go and spend the day with the polar bears and I loved it and I never got caught. Now you couldn’t do that in Lincolnshire because there was nowhere to go and everybody would go and tell your dad, you know, so all these sort of things that I did and the way that I, you know my form of surviving and thriving was absolutely what I then took into, into business and then into the football world, 100%.
Eliott Moss
You’re going to find out much more about how that thriving and surviving impacted Carol’s business career because she happened to have sold her business with her husband earlier this year to a private equity house and we’ll be finding a lot more out about that very shortly. Stay with me for much more.
It’s Carol Shanahan OBE, my Business Shaper today, co-founder… I can’t, I like it when I’ve got OBEs and MBEs and CBEs on the show and I am very lucky that I get to meet all these people with these great titles and we’ll come onto that in a moment.
Carol Shanahan
Do you know when I got, when I got the email to tell me I’d got it, I thought it was a scam.
Eliott Moss
Everybody, so many people say that.
Carol Shanahan
I told Prince Charles, as he was then, when I got it, I said, he said “Were you surprised to get an OBE?”, I said, “To be honest, I thought it was a scam, I was looking for the bit for sending the money.”
Eliott Moss
Did he laugh?
Carol Shanahan
Yeah, he said, “Well those things do exist but I can promise you this is real.” I said, “Yeah, I’ve kind of got that now.”
Eliott Moss
And then you can poke him and go, “Excuse me, can I just touch you, are you real? Yes, you seem to be.” So I just want to talk about this, you said something about the truancy and these transferrable skills and you’re kind of half joking, not joking and the Synectics business that you set up, a) you were a, your first job as I understand it was not a job you were meant to get, it was a technology related job, they were looking for a man at the time, they got you, you convinced them to do it, and then I’m going to just jump forward to then you meet your soon to be husband at some point, you set up this business, oh thank you very much, and suddenly thirty years later, the overnight success obviously, you sell it for a significant amount, undisclosed but people have made their minds up about what that might be, amazing success for the, the young woman who didn’t have any qualifications, who didn’t know anything about technology. How?
Carol Shanahan
How did I get that job?
Eliott Moss
Well how did you get the job? How did that? I mean so many hows but yeah, how did that job in the first place and how has it informed how you’ve gone on and created this fantastic business?
Carol Shanahan
I got the job because I think I’ve always had this sort of deep faith that everything’s going to be okay and I’m going to get there and it will, it will…
Eliott Moss
Why?
Carol Shanahan
Well because you have to have, because what do you do if you haven’t got that? You know, so, even as a small child, as a young girl, I had that, you know, it was, no, no, no, it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be alright, and I’ve never, I didn’t do well in education, I had five abortive attempts at education and none of those worked, because I’m just, I’m just not that person and funnily enough I’ve got four children, two of whom have done incredibly well with academia, two wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole but you know they’re, they are…
Eliott Moss
And what do you think that’s about, that bit about you not being you know the abortive attempts for you but a couple of your kids really thriving, what do you think now with your wisdom? What’s that, what does that go to?
Carol Shanahan
Because it instinctively, I felt that that was a system there that was made for the, the majority and I didn’t, and I never could argue that it was the right thing to do, if you’re running a country, you know you need an educational system and you need to be able to incorporate the, the middle ground, absolutely, 100%. I never, I never was in the middle ground and I never felt that it, it suited me.
Eliott Moss
And how old were you when you knew that, Carol?
Carol Shanahan
Instinctively, I think I’ve always known it and when I was forty I went back because I ended up back in Lincolnshire when I was a teenager and I went to the local grammar school and I drove them berserk and I really feel for them and I went to a school reunion at forty and I saw the maths teacher and he said to me, “What are you doing?” I’d gone in Kevin’s car because it looked more flashy than mine and I wanted to show I’d been a success, and I actually said to the, to the deputy head who was there, I said, “Ooh is Dr Morris here?” who was the physics teacher, and she said, “No, why?” and I said, "Oh I just wanted to let him know that I’d finished my homework” and she said, “I shall let him know that miracles happen eventually” and I thought oh we’ve not thawed have we, we’ve not thawed. My dad was convinced that this woman fancied him and he kept saying, “Oh she fancies me”, I said, “She doesn’t, dad”, he said, “Well she keeps calling me up to the school week after week” and “That’s because I’m a nightmare dad, that’s nothing to do with you” you know. So even then, I knew I was being a nightmare. But anyway this maths teacher said to me, “What are you doing?” and I told him and he said, “I always knew you’d do well”, I said, “You didn’t, you described me to the gutter” and he said, “No, you were walking a path and you were going to fall one way or the other. Whichever way was going to be spectacular but there was something about you and I thought no, she will fall the right way.”
Eliott Moss
And what was the, how would he have described the ‘something about you’?
Carol Shanahan
Well it is that, it is that just that survival, that sort of not letting, not letting things grind me down, which they don’t, you know so, and this is what really pushes me to help kids now, teenage kids, because there are so many walking that path that I walked and how do we give them the opportunity to be able to fall the right way because I went and created the opportunity to fall the right way.
Eliott Moss
And I want to get to the bottom of that, I think it’s more than resilience, Carol and we’re going to find out what that is. I don’t know what it is yet but there’s something else because that can explain taking the knocks but it doesn’t explain the incredible success and all the other things that you’ve been doing around effecting the community in a positive way. Much more coming up from Carol Shanahan in just a moment.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today, in case you hadn’t noticed, is Carol Shanahan OBE, co-founder of Synectics Solutions, the software company countering fraud and financial crime, and co-owner and chair of Port Vale Football Club. So we were talking before about the resilience that’s definitely part of your personality and this sense that your maths teacher said you were always going to be a success and whether he was post-rationalising and done a bit of a Google search or whatever or not, who knows.
Carol Shanahan
There was no such thing as Google.
Eliott Moss
No Google, that was back then, you’re right, you’re right, he hadn’t done anything so he obviously, maybe he was being honest.
Carol Shanahan
I think he probably was.
Eliott Moss
So, but the, was there ever a questioning of your own confidence in those early years? Was there ever a questioning of you, you said, you said you always said it was going to be fine but deep down was there a thing of, well it’s going to be alright but I mean I’m just trying to get to this, this, this how you were able to believe that you could set your own business up and how you and Kevin decided that that would be a good idea. Without any real proof, if you know what I mean.
Carol Shanahan
Yeah, I mean I think going back when I was you know so both sides of my family, everybody had stayed together and cousins who all lived you know as proper families and there was, then there was me, there was always “and then there’s Carol” you know so I was always the one of, well somebody had to have her during the holidays and so I had to kind of make it okay and I really resorted to humour and I always felt that if I could make somebody laugh then I would be alright and right from being you know small, I’ve always, I remember selling the contents of my sister’s, I’ve got a half-sister, and actually I’ll take you to that, I’m just going to change my direction here because I’ll take you to my half-sister because I think that this is part of the key. My dad married my half-sister’s mum, Vi, she was the love of his life, very volatile evidently between them but the love of his life. When she was giving birth to Jackie, my half-sister, she was diagnosed with TB and she died and my dad absolutely loved her and then years later, he comes across my mum, who looked like Vi, she looked like his first wife and I have said to Jackie, who is very balanced and very you know steady and I have said, “Jackie, you are the product of our dad and the love of his life, I am the product of our dad and the woman who looked like the love of his life. No wonder I get screwed up.” There was no rationale to put those two people together except she had this vague resemblance to somebody who’d died and that’s, that’s what made me, I mean that’s not your you know, that’s not your love job, that’s not your you know well these, this part and this part you know, this is oil and water emulsifying to become the creamiest mayonnaise you could ever find.
Eliott Moss
But, but there’s, so there’s a bit of that happening which immediately says hold on a minute, what’s my place in the world? But I, as I, as you were talking there I realised something, I think it might be because you created things from a very young age, you created your own life, you created your own structures and actually that’s what entrepreneurs do, they kind of, they have a blank piece of paper, that was your life and your position in the world and from that day on you’ve always gone well what does Carol want to do, Carol might want to do that and Carol doesn’t want to go and study but actually, you fancy that and it feels like you’ve never had any barriers because you had nothing, you had no blueprint.
Carol Shanahan
No.
Eliott Moss
And you like creating blueprints for yourself?
Carol Shanahan
Yes, absolutely.
Eliott Moss
Maybe that’s what it is.
Carol Shanahan
I think, I think you could be right. Yeah because, yeah you’ve really made me start to think now because it was the well I’m going to create it and I get really cross with people at work when I say right we’re going to go and do this well, how are we going to do that, I don’t know how we’re going to do it, we’re just going to go and do it, you know we’re going to go and make Port Vale successful. How? I ain’t got a clue, I don’t know how to run a football club, we’ll go and find out, we’ll make mistakes and then we’ll, we’ll learn from them but you know I always say with the football we never, we never ever lose, we win or we learn, sometimes we learn a hell of a lot but you know we, we take that and, and we take that throughout our life of what went wrong, what did we learn, how do we move forward, but how do we get to where we want to get to, and we get there.
Eliott Moss
Synectics Solutions born in 1992, my maths isn’t brilliant but that’s about 32 years ago, you had an event in the business earlier this year, 350 people or so work for you, nice, you know apparently, apparently doing quite well according to the numbers if you believe the media and we hold on that Carol, we’re not always sure. What does it feel like stepping away from that business now and being an investor if you like rather than running it?
Carol Shanahan
Yeah, it is changing it from being the family company to the family investment and yesterday we had this, so we had this family meeting and they were talking about Synectics had always been the fifth sibling because they’d always had to fight it for their parents’ attention at the dinner table and it always took priority when it’s you know, when sometimes they felt it shouldn’t. Then they said the next sibling that came along was Port Vale which was the really troubled child that kept nicking from their mother’s purse and you know.
Eliott Moss
But I want to, so the sibling thing, but with the Synectics thing has it always been a well-behaved child?
Carol Shanahan
It’s been an interesting journey and we’ve, when we, when we got to the day, the day of the transaction and it went through and our biggest thing was we didn’t fail, we didn’t fail, 32 years, and we’ve had things that have been thrown at us. GRG, do you remember GRG with the Royal Bank of Scotland? They came within an inch of taking us down, that was the most horrendous time we’ve ever had and if it hadn’t have been for the fact that a senior member of the bank had come up to Stoke-on-Trent a few months before and he’d gone to see two clients and we were the ones for the afternoon and it was only the fact that I messaged him and said look can you give me some advice where to go because GRG have come after us and they were going to take us, I mean they said “We are taking you, we are going to take your company” and he came and backed us and he got, he got that stopped but if he hadn’t have done, we would have gone down. So we’ve had a few of those.
Eliott Moss
Did it feel emotional at the point of sale though?
Carol Shanahan
It was interesting, I’d been broken into so that week was, I’d been broken into by five masked men, I mean you couldn’t write this, you couldn’t write, if you were writing a drama for the TV and you’d put this out, they’d say no, you’ve gone too far here, this is ridiculous, because Port Vale wasn’t doing well at all on the pitch, Tuesday night we’d just had a terrible match, we’d played really woefully, that’s the word isn’t it, ‘woeful’, and I’d got home 11 o’clock and I went to bed and I live in a, at the moment I live in a Victorian terraced house and there was just me in the house with my two useless Cavalier dogs and at quarter to 2 one of them barked once, so the doorbell made a funny sound, so I thought ooh something going on, so I go to the window on the landing and there’s these five masked men and so me being me, I opened the window which took some time and put my head right out and shouted, “What are you doing?” and they said, “We’re the police, we’re coming in, we’re the police” and I said, “No, you’re not, go away” and they said, “We’re the police, we’re coming in” and with that they kicked the door in and came into the house. Anyway, I screamed like a fishwife, I mean I screamed and screamed and screamed and eventually they went and I went downstairs and I phoned the police and at that point, you’re in that point of trauma and your mind tries to make sense of why, why me, why now, why has this happened and when I was on the 999 call, I was saying to them “Look, this may not be relevant but I’m Carol Shanahan, I own Port Vale Football Club, we played terribly tonight, you know looks like we’re going to get relegated”, there had been threats but I mean they weren’t serious threats, there wasn’t, nothing like that but you’re trying to make sense and they sent a load of cars and they, they, you know they came pretty quick because I spoke to them afterwards and they said at that point Carol, it was a threat to life, we didn’t know that they weren’t coming after you.
Eliott Moss
And this is all in the week?
Carol Shanahan
Oh this is, this is the Tuesday.
Eliott Moss
So is it, is it about perspective in terms of this happened and then you?
Carol Shanahan
This happened.
Eliott Moss
And then you’ve got that going on in the background and then where, so your head wasn’t really in the deal anyway at that?
Carol Shanahan
Well no, so, so we had that on the Tuesday, we got relegated on the Saturday and the deal went through on the Monday and for a good hour or so, the money was floating around in the ether and you just think is this going to be the third thing of the week, is this going to be you know, is, is something going to happen now and then when it does happen, it’s like when people pay their mortgage off, you think “I’m going to pay my mortgage off and it’s going to be amazing” and I remember the first time we sold a business and we paid our mortgage off and it is the most underwhelming feeling in the world.
Eliott Moss
I want to hold that thought because I want to find out what is the upside, I want to know what the positive stuff was but we’re going to cover that in our final chat with you, Carol Shanahan. And we’ve got some James Brown coming up as well, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Carol Shanahan is my Business Shaper but not for very long and I’ve got so many questions to ask you so, I’m going to try and make these good. You were talking then about really what is called perspective, it’s context you know, it’s, you should have felt good but there were so many other things going on that actually the money comes in, the money goes out to various things and it just isn’t what you expect. The highs and the lows of running a football club, they must be extreme and you talked about relegation, Port Vale have been very near the top of the table, have been top of the table this season, things are going well. Is it as irrational as it looks from the outside in terms of the way that decisions are made in a football club or is it closer to the way that you ran your business?
Carol Shanahan
It’s closer to the way that you run your business, the difference…
Eliott Moss
Than it looks from the outside?
Carol Shanahan
Yeah, now the difference with running a football club is you have, whatever happens, so that time during GRG with Synectics, nobody knew, even the staff didn’t know, we absorbed that, that all came in and you do that as an internal thing. There’s very little internal in a football club but you have all these thousands of people who, I always describe it as it’s like they’ve looked through one window and made a whole judgement about the house, you know but you’ve only looked through one window and you haven’t got the information but you’ve, you’ve made judgements, you’ve made assumptions and then acted as if they’re a fact and they’re not, they’re an assumption.
Eliott Moss
So there’s a public nature which isn’t there in the business.
Carol Shanahan
It’s so hard.
Eliott Moss
And then there’s the thing about and in business we have this as well about winning and losing but in football you can’t, you know you’ve got to treat those two as exactly the same, how do you manage that?
Carol Shanahan
You have to, managing the fans but managing where you sit with the fans. So my daughters have had to come off social media altogether because they, they were saying that it’s one thing with people having a go at their mother, it’s another when you know there’s all these accusations of affair, I’ve had so many affairs in the last year but they’ve been transparent to the user because I don’t know about them, you know and…
Eliott Moss
Have they gone well? Have you enjoyed them?
Carol Shanahan
I must have done.
Eliott Moss
What does Kevin say? Is he fine? Has he said, “Knock yourself out, Carol.”
Carol Shanahan
He’s quite narked because he hadn’t had any. And so yeah you get all of this nonsense going on and I remember at one point, Patrick my son was at home and I was reading this, this dialogue between these two chaps on Facebook about me and it was really horrible and at the end Patrick said, “Would you invite those two men into your kitchen to speak to you like that?” and I said, “No, I wouldn’t.” He said, “You just did. By standing in the kitchen and reading out and absorbing what they were saying, you just invited them into the kitchen” and so taking that, how do you have this relationship with the fans, you handle their sense of entitlement because it is their faith base system so you know they do have entitlements but at the same time you know you put your family’s wealth going into it as well, how do you balance those two out? How do you balance this whole thing with social media?
Eliott Moss
But you’ve got to. That’s what you do.
Carol Shanahan
You have to and what I do now is I keep an eye on a Saturday of teams, particularly ones where I know the owner or the CEO or somebody and if they haven’t played well and if their manager doesn’t do a great interview, if they sound a bit flat, will message the owner and just say look are you guys alight, you know I’m here because come February, there’s going to be a good 18 clubs in the EFL in a relegation battle and their staff will go through hell, their community organisation, come on the board of the EFL in the community, their community organisations will go through hell because their men’s first team isn’t performing well on the pitch.
Eliott Moss
Let me just quickly jump to Robbie Williams, another public figure, he’s the President now of Port Vale Football Club.
Carol Shanahan
He is, he’s one of our two Life Presidents, yep, yep.
Eliott Moss
One of your two Life Presidents. What’s it like working with a person like that?
Carol Shanahan
The first time I met him, I said to him, “Hello…
Eliott Moss
What I mean like that is, I don’t know Robbie obviously, many of us don’t know Robbie but he’s quite famous, so what’s he like when the doors are closed?
Carol Shanahan
He is. Yeah well, the first time I met him I said, “Hello Robbie, look, you’re a global superstar and I have no idea how to deal with a global superstar, could I just deal with you as a Vale fan and as a person?” and he said, “Oh thank god for that” and that’s what we do.
Eliott Moss
And did he mean that though?
Carol Shanahan
Yeah, he did. He absolutely did. Because when he, when he was made Life President, he came for a Friday night, we had this big do in one of, in our Robbie Williams Suite, which was brilliant and he phoned me the next day, he said, “There were 200 people in there” he said, “and nobody asked me for a selfie, nobody asked me for an autograph.” I said, “Are you worried they’ve gone off you?” He said, “No”, he said, “That was orchestrated” he says, “They were told not to do that weren’t they by you” and I went, “Yeah” and he said “It was amazing. I haven’t been in a room with 200 people where I could just go in there and just be me” and he said, “I was just Rob, the Vale fan.”
Eliott Moss
Clever.
Carol Shanahan
And that’s what we do. He is, he is, he is a person who happens to be a global superstar. He messages me after every, every match.
Eliott Moss
Nice. But that’s the right way to do it.
Carol Shanahan
He’s lovely.
Eliott Moss
You handle things so well in your life and I go back to that, and different things, Carol, and I know we’ve only just met but it’s just my observation of you but that blueprint that I think you create is something that your, that’s your super skill, whatever it is in front of you, you somehow work out what’s the right thing to do. I hope you carry on doing that because it feels like you’ve got lots more, lots more happening in the community, in the football club and obviously in your, as you call it, “the family investment”. I’m going to have to end it there, I can’t believe it but it’s time to say cheery bye. Just before I let you go though, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Carol Shanahan
It was the hardest thing, I spent so long, I love music, I love what it does for you and I came up with People and the version was Barbara Streisand with Stevie Wonder and this was one of my oh, very early songs, I love Barbara Streisand, my mother used to take me to Birmingham every weekend and we’d go to the cinema, I saw Sound of Music eight times, but we’d see Funny Girl or Hello, Dolly! and I just wanted to be Barbara Streisand and I used to go marching round our council flat you know singing Barbara Streisand at the top of my voice because I just thought she was an amazing person and People was one of the ones my mum had this little EP record and it had got that on it and it had also got Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking, you know which was a bonkers song which I just loved but it had this on it and I loved it because life is about people and it’s a song that’s gone through my life with me, it is about people and it is about people who need people. So, to me, it is the anthem, it’s the anthem for life.
Eliott Moss
That was Barbara Streisand, featuring Stevie Wonder with People, the song choice of my excellent Business Shaper today, Carol Shanahan. She talked about the importance of belonging, rooted deeply in her love of people and her need to be connected to different tribes of people right the way through her life. “Everything’s going to be okay” she said and she’s always used that as she’s gone through her life, underpinned by her sense of, and her ability to survive. And finally, “I’m going to create it”, she talked so much about creating different realities and indeed different constructs and blueprints as she’s gone through life with businesses, with her community charity work and of course now in the home of football at Port Vale. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.