DAVID LAMPITT INTERVIEW
David has worked in high-profile executive positions across a raft of sports:
Head of Financial Regulation at the English Football Association
Chief Executive of then Premier League club Portsmouth
Chief Executive of Supporters Direct
Managing Director of SportRadar and CEO of Tennis Data Innovations
BUILD THE INVISIBLE CHAT HIGHLIGHTS
Luck and Opportunities
“I’m a great believer in the fact that you do make your own luck. Over time, you make your own luck.
The reason those truisms about making your own luck come around is because, actually, the people who get lucky are the people who manage those multiple opportunity frameworks, perhaps without even realising or, certainly not consciously doing it..
I want to increase the chances that those great things come my way and they don't get handed to you on a plate; people have that misconception, but they don't, you have to seek them out or you have to put some of these structures in place”.
Being Humbitious
“Just make sure you consistently deliver, and actually there's nothing wrong with being ambitious, but the ambition shouldn't be the badge that you wear outwardly, it should be the thing that drives you inwardly, because if it's the badge that you wear outwardly, actually you end up probably just annoying people quite a lot of the time or just coming across in the wrong way.
That's also a life skill in itself, working out how to handle those competing considerations”.
Failure Sign-Posts
“I’m looking at somebody's CV for evidence that they've dealt with failure. I think people should be really open about that and wear it as an experience, a learning experience, rather than as something to be hidden, because actually, if I’m looking to employ somebody and they're a straight A student and sailed through all of their academics, and then rolled into a very nice job on the back of all of that and have been promoted twice in three years, and then they're looking for their next step up; I’m looking for how they're going to deal with the challenges of failing because it's going to come, and it's either going to be on a micro personal level in a project, or they're going to be involved in a bigger challenge or a bigger bit of the business which is not going to go to plan, and how do they deal with that, and how do they bounce back from it, and what character traits have they got that tell me that they're ready to take that on.
That's a really important point for me and it's something that we shouldn't encourage people to hide from, particularly in the way in which they present their career path. My career path has definitely had setbacks and I would say I've learned as much, if not more, from those setbacks and those more difficult times, than I have from a time when everything went smoothly, because that's when you really get tested and that's also when you get tested in terms of your professional capabilities, but, of course, you also get tested in terms of how you can deal with it on a more personal and character level.”
TRANSCRIPT
DG
David, thanks so much for joining and having the chat with me.
When I was doing a bit of prep for the conversation, there were loads of places I was thinking about starting with our conversation, only because we've known each other for quite a long time, bearing in mind the work that you've done in football, out of football, inside and outside sport more generally, and part of the reason for me trying to write a book about the entertainment industry, or how to make a career in it, I thought you'd be perfect to have a conversation with because, probably similar to you, and I know we've done some talks to this effect beforehand, I get asked a lot of the time, how do you go about building a career in sports, in music and television, in fashion, whatever it may be; how do you go about building the skills, the soft skills, and actually the technical skills, to go about doing something that you're passionate about or you're curious about, that you want to get involved in and do more of?
I always find it’s a very hard and easy question to answer and I would just be really interested to hear some thoughts and insights.
Then we can take the conversation in different ways about whether sport and football was something you always wanted to get involved in and how you went about it, either strategically, slightly by chance or otherwise getting involved, and some of the lessons, ideas and habits you've learnt along the way.
DL
I'll start with how I got involved.
I don't have a background that has any particular resonance for sport. I love sport and have always played sport, but maths was my subject at school. I studied languages at university and I then went on to study accountancy professional qualifications and I guess there was nothing in there that pointed me specifically towards sport.
I've always been a big sports fan. I've always been passionate about it and I always obviously liked the idea of potentially somehow using my skills in that arena, but I hadn't necessarily worked out how that would come about.
The story of how I got involved is quite a funny one I guess, because it has a few good lessons or elements to it.
I got my break in sport by taking a job with the Football Association in 2003 and that came about because, at least a year before I took that job, possibly even slightly more than a year, but let's call it a year before I took that job, I read an article in the Sunday Times one Sunday in the sport section. At the time, I was working as a financial investigator right after I qualified as an accountant. I joined a particular team and we were doing forensic financial investigation.
So, there was an article in the Sunday Times about the FA. At this time there was a bit of ongoing scandal about the football transfer market about bungs and the bung culture and that the FA was determined to try to do something about it and had for the first time employed a senior compliance officer. They employed a head of compliance, I think, to bolster their efforts to regulate this part of the game. I read this and, honestly as I was reading it, I was thinking, this is what I should do, as in, this would be a great thing to get involved in, and not only would it be a great thing to get involved in, I've got a bunch of skills that I've built up in my short professional career to that point, that I really think could be quite relevant.
The person who had just been appointed as the head of compliance was named in the article and so I sat down and wrote a letter to him. I confess I've never done that any other time before, or since in fact, but I really felt that there was something in there that resonated with my skill set and experience. I composed a letter and sent it off to Steve Barrow, who, I don't want to ruin the story, ended up being my boss.
I got a very polite letter back within a week or so, saying thanks very much, I was interested to read your letter and CV, however don't believe everything you read in the papers as we're not actually recruiting anyone at the moment, but we'll keep you on file. Of course, I, like everyone else who receives that letter, thought, yeah okay, when they say on file, that is a euphemism for waste paper basket, and move on, and so actually, I did move on.
I ended up planning a very different career path and in fact a very different career move, because I was planning to move to Australia as I’m half Aussie. That move was not as a result of that, but at the time, I was obviously looking for what was going to be my next career move.
Anyway, six months later, at least six months later, I got a cold call out of the blue one evening. I still remember exactly where I was when I took the call, and it was from a recruitment consultant who had been appointed by the FA. They said, you know that letter you wrote six months ago? Well, the FAA is actually now thinking of recruiting somebody into that team and they kept hold of your CV and would you still be interested in putting yourself forward?
I was slightly taken aback and thought, I've got nothing to lose but it'll never happen as the world and his mother will be applying for this job and it'll never happen, but we might as well go through the process and it'll be interesting to get an insight into the inner workings of the FA.
I went from first round interview, down to the final ten, down to the final three, at which point my girlfriend, now my wife, said, we might have to think about not moving to Australia if this goes any further. They ended up offering me the job and we did have this crossroads moment of deciding whether I pursued a different career path but staying in the work that I was doing but moving to the other side of the world, or to go for it in football or in sport generally, but football specifically, and I chose the latter very clearly, and that was largely due to the unique opportunity that that job presented.
That’s a story that probably doesn't happen very often and I feel like maybe I got lucky but as we'll talk about in response to other parts of the narrative that you're building up, actually I’m a great believer in the fact that you make your own luck and probably nobody else saw that article and wrote in a letter, but also, I guess, sought to match their professional experience to the sort of thing that the FA was looking for at that time, and then somehow pulled it off.
I've told the story before and I've told it to students in particular and people who are starting out in their career, because I’m a great believer in the fact that you do make your own luck and over time, you make your own life.
The best teams are always the luckiest teams, they say, and I can only say that in the course of my career, there have been one, or more than one probably, examples, of exactly that.
DG
You've taken the words out of my mouth with a couple of things I’m going to say, which is great.
A lot of the conversations I've had with other people talk exactly about that type of proactivity, and the more people that I speak to, the more I’m encouraged by the concept of proactivity, of putting disparate ideas together sometimes to form a way forward or a plan, and how consuming content in lots of different ways usually helps that, and part of the thing that I’m trying to explain to people in the book is, if you marry that investment in yourself by reading, by doing, by consuming, mixed with that proactivity usually leads to an exponential ability to have lots of irons in fires, as long as they can constantly be managed.
DL
I fully agree and I fully subscribe to that.
The reason those truisms about making your own luck come around is because, actually, the people who get lucky are the people who manage those multiple opportunity frameworks, perhaps without even realizing or, certainly not consciously doing it.
There is an element of that, that if you're constantly leading your life, thinking, how can I take advantage of this, or this, or some other relationship, to get an opportunity, that's probably not going to work, but the reality is, as you say, if you open yourself up to those avenues and channels that are not necessarily going to present themselves to you, so there's hard work involved in that.
Be open to those things. Keep an eye out for them. As you said, consuming the fact that I happened to be reading the paper that Sunday literally changed my life and changed the course of my life, because, even if the recruitment consultant had put something out in the market, I probably wouldn't have seen it at the time, so as you say, make those avenues and make those channels available to you.
We'll probably touch on this, but it's also about hard work. I’m a great believer in the fact that the opportunity that strikes, it’s like the actor who has worked unbelievably hard for 20 years and then is an overnight phenomenon, but actually, they've worked incredibly hard for 20 years, building a framework of opportunities, and one of them hits at a certain point in time, but the reality is, that's a much more common outcome than genuinely somebody who is an overnight success. That does of course happen, but those are unicorns, and yeah, I’m not a unicorn, I’m just an ordinary guy who has worked hard and has, hopefully, in the course of their career, sought out those connections with other people, with other content, other areas of interest, and through making multiple connections.
Sometimes those two things come together, the universe somehow collides.
DG
It's fascinating how you mention all that because actually the name of the book is called Build the Invisible and it fits really nicely into a couple of other questions I was going to ask around that.
It's exactly right that you're doing the thing that no one else sees, that isn't visible for a huge amount of time, but built on a passion or curiosity, and almost one of the things that I’m trying to get around in my head is in terms of what I did in the past, which was a curiosity mindset in a way. You had a habit of reading the Sunday Times and connecting different disparate things together; was it that curiosity or that passion, in sport and in football that certainly got animated by reading that or had it been gone before that, or was there other things that you were thinking about at the same time?
I’m really interested in how you, at that moment, combined the thing that you were reading with your skill set and that created a new opportunity, that if you hadn't read, or if you weren't a reader, if you didn't consume it, just wouldn't have compounded?
DL
Absolutely, and I would say that I probably had multiple different channels or avenues, in different areas in fact, even in different industry sectors, so I wasn't uniquely focused on sport, of course I was super interested in it, and that spark of that moment of, okay, this actually could be the way in which I can bring my particular skillsets into that arena, that was the conversion moment, I suppose, but actually, at that time, I was also looking at other very different areas of future opportunity.
At that stage, I was probably five or six years into my professional career and thinking, I've done a foundational level of training, as you did in the law, and I have done finance, what do I want to do with it and where do I want this to take me?
I definitely wasn't uniquely focused but it goes back to the previous point, which is by having those multiple different frameworks of opportunity, that's how eventually something comes about. In fact, the move to Australia, which didn't happen, was a bit similar actually, and that opportunity came about through a professional connection and also a personal connection, because I was half Australian and, again, a different avenue opened up, but equally I could have gone down that avenue, but I think the point is, and I say this to my kids all the time, that hard work and the kind of things that you do that people don't see, actually never think that nobody notices it, and I say to my kids, I say it to the people that I work with, the people that I manage, and I think this is one of the tough messages, but it doesn't mean that you will get every opportunity, of course it doesn't, because that doesn't happen to anyone but it does mean that you're always increasing the likelihood, you're always increasing your probabilities of the opportunity coming your way when it comes around or when it next comes around and that ultimately is what you want to do.
I want to increase the chances that those great things come my way and they don't get handed to you on a plate; people have that misconception, but they don't, you have to seek them out or you have to put some of these structures in place; some of them may be conscious, some of them even unconscious, that help you get to that point.
The one other word that I wanted to share with you, because it's always stuck with me, well I say always, it has come to me relatively more recently, not back at the start of my career, but it's a great word because it encapsulates some of those things that we've talked about, and it's a word that Riot Games uses actually. Riot is a huge global gaming publisher and they have, I don't know if they still have, but they always had these five characteristics that they look for in a Riot Games person.
One of those characteristics always stuck with me and it was a word which they had created – ‘humbitious’. It’s a mix of being humble in the way that you go about your work and you keep your head down and you get on with stuff, but that doesn't mask the fact that you should be ambitious, and you can be ambitious and do those things at the same time. I really like that balancing of those two ideas and it's just a nice way of framing the sort of traits that you want to drive and see in the people that you're developing.
DG
Is that something along the lines of, not quite under promise but over deliver, but almost like, let your work do the talking for you, believe in yourself and don't take shortcuts, invest in all the things you want to do, but impress people by your output, rather than by talking a good game.
DL
That's absolutely it. Just make sure you consistently deliver, and actually there's nothing wrong with being ambitious, but the ambition shouldn't be the badge that you wear outwardly, it should be the thing that drives you inwardly, because if it's the badge that you wear outwardly, actually you end up probably just annoying people quite a lot of the time or just coming across in the wrong way.
That's also a life skill in itself, working out how to handle those competing considerations, because in the early stage of your career, people are ambitious and they want to get on, but they've also got to realise that the hard work is in the engineering room and is ultimately what people recognize and value in the career opportunities that are going to come your way.
I’m definitely an advocate of that, as I say, and I really like the word, so I wanted to share that with you because it often comes back to me, when I’m recruiting in particular.
DG
In terms of that recruitment process, I'm fascinated in what you, in your current role and job, are looking for; what type of characteristics are you looking for, either from what people say on their CV, say by way of interview, or do as a result of the things that you can see that, subliminally or otherwise, come across. Are there particular, not non-negotiables, but things that really excite you when you speak to people and then can see potential?
DL
That's an interesting one because, to be more general about it, it's probably easier in this context to talk about characteristics or character traits that you look for, rather than the specific technical skills to do a job in my current company or a previous one.
That focus on delivery is super important, but the one thing that I would probably frame in there, which I generally do now look for, when I’m looking at somebody's CV is evidence of the fact that they've dealt with failure. I think people should be really open about that and wear it as an experience, a learning experience, rather than as something to be hidden, because actually, if I’m looking to employ somebody and they're a straight A student and sailed through all of their academics, and then rolled into a very nice job on the back of all of that and have been promoted twice in three years, and then they're looking for their next step up; I’m looking for how they're going to deal with the challenges of failing because it's going to come, and it's either going to be on a micro personal level in a project, or they're going to be involved in a bigger challenge or a bigger bit of the business which is not going to go to plan, and how do they deal with that, and how do they bounce back from it, and what character traits have they got that tell me that they're ready to take that on.
That's a really important point for me and it's something that we shouldn't encourage people to hide from, particularly in the way in which they present their career path. My career path has definitely had setbacks and I would say I've learned as much, if not more, from those setbacks and those more difficult times, than I have from a time when everything went smoothly, because that's when you really get tested and that's also when you get tested in terms of your professional capabilities, but, of course, you also get tested in terms of how you can deal with it on a more personal and character level.