Читать книгу Strong Woman: The Truth About Getting to the Top - Karren Brady - Страница 7

Ambitious, driven, determined – that’s how people talk about me, I know, and I guess I they’re right. But to me these words are empty because they say nothing about what really counts, what pushes a person forward. For me, the one thing more than anything else that’s motivated me, the goal I have been striving to reach all my life, is independence. More than money, fame or glamour, I have always been driven by that desire: to live a life where no one could ever tell me what to do. One where only I would have control over me and no one could tell me what to think or how to act.

I’ve always been this way. I still am. I shudder at the thought of ever having to ask anyone for money to buy a new coat or a lipstick. And it’s this drive, more than any other, which has got me out of bed every day, has made me push myself forward to success.

So where did the desire for independence, the need for control or, well, sheer bloody-mindedness come from? Writing this book, I’ve had to dwell on how and – a much harder question to answer – why I became who I am. I don’t reflect on such things easily, because I’ve never been an emotional person. That’s an understatement, if ever there was one: I’m logic personified! It’s not quite ‘Call me Spock’ but I’m the sort of person who, when a door shuts, never opens it again. I march forward and never glance back to the path behind me. It’s helped me throughout my career: I don’t waste time second-guessing my decisions and pondering the what-ifs. And up until now, I’ve never really questioned why I’m like this. Yet looking back over my life, as I tried to work out how and where the desire for independence began to make itself felt, I realised I could pinpoint it exactly.

I was three years old when my mum and nan left me at home one day with my grandfather, while they went shopping. I remember my parents had this elegant drinks cabinet in the lounge. As a toddler, I was fascinated by it. The door folded down and all these beautiful little glasses and different-coloured bottles glinted away in the backlight. I decided to get a chair, climb up and have a good look. Everything looked even better close up. The dainty little glasses (for sherry), the perfect size for me, were so tempting that I started to fill them up with the green, yellow and clear liquids I saw in the bottles: crème de menthe, advocaat and vodka, I know now! Taking little sips and inviting my dolls to do the same, I was having a wonderful time – until my grandfather came into the room and asked what I was doing. Of course, as soon as he twigged, he told me to stop. Three-year-old me instantly replied, ‘This is my house and I’ll do as I want.’ He left me to it. He was married to my grandmother, so perhaps he knew not to pick a losing fight!

Unsurprisingly, when my mum and nan got home I was rolling drunk and, by all accounts, not much more co-operative. My grandfather got an earful, I was put to bed, and the story passed into family lore for ever more. As my nan used to tell me: ‘You were such a little cow – and you know what? You weren’t sick, not once. Not a drop.’ When you’ve got that streak in you as a toddler, no one’s ever going to be able to tell you what to do when you’re fully grown.

It wasn’t a one-off, either. A few months later my mum took me to school for the very first time. Picking me up after my first day, she asked the teacher how I had got on. She’d been worried, my mum admitted, as I was very shy. ‘Which one is your daughter?’ the teacher asked.

‘Karren Brady,’ said my mother.

‘Karren Brady?’ was the incredulous response. ‘Shy? She walked in, pulled a boy off his chair and said, “That’s my seat. Move.” I wouldn’t be worried if I was you!’ It was advice my mother took to heart. In fact, that was probably the last time she worried about me.

Not that this mind-set always made things easy. I went to boarding school when I was thirteen, and that was tough in many ways, but the hardest thing of all was the lack of freedom or choice. You had to write on a noticeboard when you wanted a bath, booking a slot! Then you had twenty minutes to wash out a bath someone else had just used, bathe, dry and get dressed. It was always a rush, and it’s probably why even now I can’t sit in a bathtub for longer than a few minutes without thinking I should get out, get on, get moving. Another thing I hated was having nothing of my own. Not my own bed, not my own pillows, not even a drawer that belonged to me. I was stuck in a dormitory with lots of other girls. Some snored. Some talked all night. Some I couldn’t stand.

I remember realising while I was there that if I wanted to ensure I was never – in emotional terms – put in a place like that again, to ensure that nobody would ever be able to say to me, ‘I am in control of you and you will do what I say, you will eat what I say, you will bathe when I say, you will wear what I say,’ I had to be independent. And, for that, it was clear, I would need funds. It didn’t worry me that I had no dreams that matched the desire for money. There was no job I wanted, no career I felt drawn to. I would have happily worked on a market stall if I’d thought it would make me money. That said, I wasn’t then and I’m not now driven by money, but I knew it was the means to independence and that drove me forward.

Boarding school makes my early life sound all ponies and privilege, but before I went I’d had a very normal upbringing. I lived with my mum and dad, Rita and Terry, and my brother, Darren, my elder by 18 months, in Edmonton, north London. Until I was 13, I went to a number of different schools, including the local comprehensive. My father was a businessman, in printing, and – whatever that word signals – ambitious. He was starting to make his way in the world, and as he hit his milestones, our life changed, quite visibly. So during my childhood we went from living in a very small terraced house in Mitchell Road which backed on to the milk depot to a slightly bigger three-bedroom house in Empire Avenue, then into a much bigger detached house on the Ridgeway, Cuffley. By the time I was 17, we had an estate in Crews Hill.

That meant there was a powerful feeling all around me, all the way through my childhood, that you could achieve most things through hard work. My father worked all the time and gradually it started to pay off. My mum got a sports car, my dad a Rolls-Royce, we started to go on fancy holidays, my brother and I were eventually moved to private schools – and it was all the result of hard graft. If my dad pulled off a big deal, he would take us to a posh children’s clothes shop in Golders Green called Please Mum and fit us out, which was always exciting. There was never any feeling that he was doing this for himself: his hard work was for the whole family.

It was never just about wanting more. The way I see it, if you have a bit of a spirit in you, you don’t want it broken. That means you can end up finding within yourself a relentless energy and a capacity for hard work to realise your ambitions. In this country, we tend to think that ambition and ruthlessness come hand in hand – that if you’re ambitious, you’re not a very nice person – but I don’t think that’s true at all. I think ambitious people are just the ones who have an inner pride. A spark that sets them apart. They don’t just accept their lot. They’re fighters and grafters and they claw their way out of often difficult circumstances. Alan Sugar is like that, and so is my father. Dad came from very humble origins, not knowing who his father was and with a mother who had to work very hard all her life.

In fact, my dad definitely has all the attributes of an achiever. A lot of people fear failure so much that they can’t achieve anything. They may have the great ideas but they can’t turn them into reality. But my father does. He’s a real go-getter. He understands that saying yes is always the way to do it. He’s a ‘Yes-yes-yes-until-it’s-no’ man. He understands that you have to be personable, able to make decisions and relentlessly hardworking in order to achieve.

As for my mum, she was a conventional mother and housewife and had a different sort of influence on me. She was very glamorous – she and my dad would go out every Saturday night, and every week she had a new dress, with her cigarettes dyed to match the colour of her outfit. She’s still amazed at my achievements and some of the things I do. That said, she has her own steely side and can hold her own in any situation.

Still, the atmosphere I grew up in was not the sort where you set yourself goals and went off and delivered them. It was more a leave-no-stone-unturned, keep-trying, keep-grafting philosophy. We were always striving to do better and that has been a very important influence on me. I don’t just look at where things are and think, This is OK. I look at how things could be better. Good, I find, is always a barrier to being great. If things are good, you don’t want to rock the boat. And some people, some businesses, can’t see why you’d want to change anything about good. But to be great you have to forsake good and take risks. In business, a lot of people settle for the way things are. They don’t have that vision of how things could be improved, or understand that by sheer hard work and gritting your teeth you can make them better. That was a lesson I learnt from my dad and it was a good one.

It may sound contradictory, but although my father’s example of hard work was so important to me, he didn’t really push me or expect a great deal from me, and probably at some points in my life I didn’t expect much of myself either. I wasn’t naturally gifted at anything. I wasn’t keen on sports, I wasn’t the best at art, I wasn’t academic – I wasn’t the best at anything. In fact I was a very average child who really didn’t know what she was going to do or where she was going to go.

I remember feeling ill every time I got a school report, as I’d inevitably get some mediocre grade that would result in a ‘Brady bollocking’ because my parents thought I didn’t try hard enough. I don’t remember being particularly bothered about those, unpleasant as they were, but I do think they helped me gain an underlying steely drive. I was determined to show my parents that when it really mattered I would come into my own. I wasn’t sure when that would be, or how I would achieve it, but I knew somehow I would do something – something better than they expected me to do anyway.

It was that stubborn streak coming out, as it always did. When my brother was 17 my dad bought him a Ferrari as his first car. Not a lot of parents would give their teenage son a car like that, I know, but as I’ve said, my dad loved sharing his success with his family. I had a Ford, but I soon gave it up, got a loan and bought a battered old Golf. Even then I knew it was better to have a battered old car and my freedom.

I do think that, subconsciously, I wanted my parents to be proud of me. I have heard that they are a million times by now but, of course, it doesn’t mean as much when we’re older. Yet even when I was young, I could easily have cut myself away from my family. And I did for a while, going off to do my own thing, without the need for their approval or disapproval. It came back to that independence of mine – I didn’t want anything from them and I didn’t want them to want anything from me.

I’m close to my parents today, though. I speak to my dad every day and I see him and Mum at least once a week. They love my children, and my dad comes to watch the football regularly. He’s supported my husband Paul in his football career, too, first as a player, now as a manager. I know they’re there for me, no matter what.

Of course there were other powerful influences in my childhood. Both of my grandmothers were hard workers, strong women and very important in moulding me. I was very close to my mother’s mother in particular, who put end to that alcoholic tea party when I was three. Grandma Nina was dynamite. She was Italian, from Naples, and incredibly feisty. She would have killed for her family – she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. If someone cut up my grandfather in traffic, she would get out of the car and punch them on the nose.

I’m sure it won’t come as any surprise when I say that she was definitely the one in control of her house and marriage. Grandma Nina would say when, she would say how, she would say how many. She was great with money – not because she had a lot, but she knew the price of everything and she was in charge. My grandfather, Gerald, went out to work as a postman, but she would take his wages and give him cash to spend. That was just the way it was. My brother and I would often spend weekends and holidays with them and she was in and out of our house, so we spent a lot of time together.

Grandma Nina really believed in me. Her attitude was: you can do it, so go out there and get on with it. She always pushed me forward: ‘Get to the front of the queue!’ She was very competitive on my and Darren’s behalf and she was an amazing role model. I looked up to her and loved her very much. And if I get a bit feisty at home my husband will still say to me, ‘Oh, Nina’s here. Nina’s coming out.’

My father’s mother, Grandma Rose, was another hard worker. She worked till she was nearly 80 in the Corkscrew, a famous London wine bar, where she baked the pies and cooked the meals. Another very independent woman. I miss them both a lot, now that they are no longer with us.

All these strong characters in my family tree passed something on to me, I am sure. From an early age I was a self-sufficient child, happy with my own company – which I still am. I don’t think anyone can teach you that: it’s the way you’re born. I’d be in my room all the time, watching my telly, and my parents would call up, ‘Are you going to come down?’ but I would refuse. I wasn’t unhappy – I just liked to do my own thing.

And I liked things my way and wanted to make my own decisions. I remember once being on holiday with my parents when I was 10 and they decided we should all have a sleep in the afternoon. Of course, I had different ideas. Darren, who would have been 11, and I sat in the lounge of the self-catering apartment we had and made up a song called ‘Half A Beer Saint Allier’ after finding a bottle of it in the fridge. We’d sing, ‘Half a beer Saint Allier round and round,’ and spin the bottle. When the bottle stopped, it was time to take a swig. Needless to say, we were roaring drunk when our parents woke up. They blamed me, even though Darren was older. They were probably right to do so. To this day I’ve never been able to drink beer without remembering that afternoon!

Speaking my mind was always my only option. In situations where other people would keep their mouths shut for a quiet life, I was the opposite. Darren used to say to me, ‘Why do you have to say what everyone else is thinking? Why do you do that?’ But biting my tongue just wasn’t me – if I had something to say I wanted to be able to say it, which caused some eye-rolling. ‘Oh, Karren!’

I was fiercely determined. If I wanted something and my parents wouldn’t give it to me, I’d find a way to get it for myself. I was never given pocket money: my parents always said, ‘If you need something, let us know,’ which was very kind of them, but I wanted to be in charge of my own money. I recall them once saying no to something I wanted, I can’t remember what it was – but I haven’t forgotten what I decided to do. I put up signs in my bedroom window – it was my bedroom so I could do what I liked, I reasoned – saying, ‘Massages, manicures, come inside!’ My mother was shouting up, ‘Who are all these weirdoes coming to the door?’ and I bawled back, ‘They’re my customers!’

I was definitely bloody-minded. I once put up a Vote Labour poster in my bedroom just because my parents were Conservatives. ‘Take that down!’ my dad roared.

‘It’s my bedroom!’

He said, ‘What does the poster even mean?’ and I didn’t know, of course, I just knew it would wind him up and cause a debate.

I wasn’t all trouble, though. From an early age I had enormous energy and an appetite for hard work. I used to get up at five o’clock in the morning and go to work with Nanny Nina, who was an office cleaner. No one made me do that – I enjoyed it. Even then I just really liked working. And to this day I love cleaning.

Another thing I learnt when I was very young was never to take no as the final answer, that there is always room for a bit more manoeuvring. At my boarding school you were given a limited number of weekend passes to go home. I quickly worked out that if you asked all the time and the nuns felt they were always saying no, they were more likely to say yes – eventually. So I’d ask every weekend. They’d say no, so I’d say, ‘Well, you’ve said no five times and it’s important,’ and they‘d give in. In the end, I had more time at home than anybody else, through strategy and sheer persistence.

Despite all the effort I made to go home, I was confident that I could take care of myself. My mother used to say, ‘You’re absolutely fearless, I don’t know where you get it from.’ Even as a young child I wanted to go out on my own, do my own thing. I longed to be independent. Before I was boarding, I took the bus to school from an early age, and on Saturdays I’d go to Wood Green, not far from where we lived, which had a high street and a bit of bustle. I think eventually my parents just thought, Oh, get on with it – I was a bit too much for them.

When I was about 14, I’d tell my mum I was going to stay the night with my best friend, Charlotte, who would tell her mum she was staying at my house. Then we would meet up with our clothes in carrier bags, get changed, take the Tube into central London and go out in Soho. When everything closed we’d walk around until the Tube restarted in the early morning and go back to our borough, Enfield, walk around until 10, then go home. Mum would say, ‘Well, you look very tired.’ But she never knew.

Years later, when I told her, she was shocked, but I was even more shocked by what she said to me. She looked at my daughter and said, ‘What goes around, come around.’ I went very cold and felt terrible about what I had done. But at the time I couldn’t have cared less. Nothing was going to happen to me: I was in control, I was safe – or, at least, I thought I was. But if I imagine my 15-year-old going out all night now, well …

But back then I was at that point when you’re not a child but not quite an adult. I thought I knew everything and I would voice my opinions all the time. If someone said black, I’d say white, just because.

Once, my father invited me to some do with a lot of businesspeople. I’d heard him say that one of them had gone bankrupt twice and had ‘knocked’ a lot of people, then set up in business again. I didn’t quite know what that meant but I knew it wasn’t very good. Dad was talking to this man, who made a negative comment about someone I knew.

‘How can you say that when you go round knocking people?’ I asked. Everyone stared at the floor and my dad tried to laugh it off. I continued, ‘But it’s true, though, isn’t it? How can you criticise somebody when that’s the way you do things?’ I think Dad secretly liked it, because I was saying what everyone was thinking. Mind you, it was the first and last event like that he ever took me to!

I wasn’t naughty or spiteful or vindictive, but I was quite demanding, opinionated and defiant. I like to think I was free-spirited, but my parents obviously didn’t agree! All in all, I must have been quite a nerve-racking daughter, and maybe that’s partly why my parents sent me to the nuns – they couldn’t rein me in.

My school, Poles Convent, was in the middle of nowhere, in Hertfordshire. The school doesn’t exist any more – the building is now a golf club and very beautiful.

People will say, ‘This is your school?’

And I say, ‘It really wasn’t like this then.’

It was an unhappy place, a bit like something out of Dickens. There was a long drive up to the school with two cattle grids and you knew when you’d gone over the second that you were past the point of no return; it was just awful. My closest friend, my-all-night-in-Soho companion, who went there too, says that her lasting memory of the school is that she was always unhappy and hungry, which just about sums it up.

It was very religious, with mass twice a day. Everyone was bored and restless, and it wasn’t as though you were even getting a really good education, because the teaching was variable. And you had no life experiences, because you never met anybody. It was very isolating and I was a bit of a loner. I didn’t have many friends because I didn’t want many friends. There were a lot of geeky, closeted girls who’d never seen anything, never been anywhere, never done anything, for whom going into Ware town centre nearby was the most amazing thing you could imagine. I just found the things they were into mind-numbingly boring. They thought it was great to stay up all night reading Jackie magazine, or watch Wimbledon all day.

Still, some of the girls did things that I would never have dreamed of doing. I was feisty and spirited but I wouldn’t smuggle boys or booze into the bedroom. There were lines I didn’t cross and that was as much about my father’s wrath as anything. My parents were easy-going to a point, but if you crossed that point … I would get as close to the barrier as I could and push against it, but I knew when to stop.

In those days my father had interests in the music business and I would take my friends to pop concerts. We’d have backstage passes to everything from Live Aid to Paul Young, which created a bit of jealousy at school, where the atmosphere was very emotional – girls got worked up about trivial things, unable to take a mature view. You can imagine, with all those teenage girls cooped up with too little to do, things would get out of proportion. But I’m not that sort of person. I don’t get emotional – if something goes wrong I try to solve the problem.

The only time I really enjoyed Poles was when I could throw myself into a project like a school play, when I’d put myself up as the director. It wasn’t that I wanted to be off drinking or doing things I shouldn’t, it was just that I couldn’t do what I wanted, whatever that happened to be.

What Poles Convent School did give me, however, was resilience and a belief in God that didn’t come from the hundreds of masses I attended, but from another experience. My friends and I were late back to school one afternoon, so I decided we’d tell the nuns that I’d hurt my ankle and we’d had to walk back very slowly. I was a good actress and laid on the pain very thick. So much so that the nuns decided to take me to hospital for an X-ray. I braced myself for a row, but at the hospital, after they’d done the X-ray, the staff told me my ankle was broken. I ended up spending that whole Easter in a cast. I realised that God moves in mysterious ways!

Divine intervention couldn’t get me out of that school though. I knew I had to spend years there and that all I could do was endure it. Even now I do things I don’t want to do because they need to be done. School taught me to stick things out.

Poles didn’t have a sixth form – thankfully! – so when I was 16 my parents had a rethink. Even they could see that Poles had left me without any life experience, and they looked for something a bit different. They sent me to Aldenham School in Elstree, a boys’ school that had been founded by a brewer some 500 years ago and took girls in the sixth form. It was quite a transition: from being surrounded by girls I went somewhere where I’d be spending all my time with boys.

I had some of the best times of my life at Aldenham and, looking back, I would say that was where my confidence began to build, with the sense that I could be whatever I wanted to be. Aldenham was a much more mature school than the convent, which suited me. You were given a lot of independence. You were expected to behave responsibly, so you did. In that respect, it was the opposite of Poles. At Aldenham I went from having no real experiences, never knowing any freedom, straight into this university-style school that had its own pub, allowed you to go out, and provided an environment for personalities to develop and adapt.

It’s interesting that two other successful businesswomen, Martha Lane Fox and Nicola Horlick, went to boys’ schools. All my friends at Aldenham were boys, and after Poles, it was a breath of fresh air. It suited me to be in a less emotional atmosphere. There was none of the jealousy there had been in my old school. Things were just simpler.

I made friends with four boys who were a year above me and we were like the musketeers – we did everything together, went everywhere together. People thought it was strange that we were a group of one girl and four boys, but those men are still my friends today – they were at my wedding, my children’s christenings and they come to my house to visit.

Living alongside them taught me a lot about where boys are coming from, and it’s pretty basic stuff. I think girls are like cats – we like our independence, want you only when we want you and like to be left alone sometimes. When we want something we’ll come to you, but most of the time we don’t want anything. Boys are like dogs – they need lots of exercise, lots of food and lots of pats on the head. To me, they’re simple creatures, very easy to work out. None of them tried to dominate me, something you might worry about if you pitched a girl into a school full of teenage boys. Mostly they seemed to want to look after me, but I didn’t need looking after. They all had their own little problems that I helped them with. I never really had any problems because I was quite happy with my life. And if I did have a problem, I never felt the need to discuss it.

So Aldenham taught me to hold my own, and it also provided a real insight into how to conduct myself around men. I learnt when not to be one of the lads. There was a real culture among some of the girls of matching the boys pint for pint, and that wasn’t me at all.

Still, much as I preferred Aldenham to the convent, I had a difficult year when my four friends left. I didn’t know anyone in my own year very well and so spent twelve months waiting for time to pass and school to finish. Another lesson in endurance: grit your teeth and get on with it.

I did the minimum amount of work for my A levels, but I used my initiative to help me through. In history, three subjects always came up, so of course I learnt those thoroughly. However, when I picked up the exam paper, there were questions only on two, leaving me a subject short. I had absolutely nothing to fall back on. But one of the other questions was, ‘Does a good history book make a good novel?’ I invented a book about the Second World War called My Struggle to fit the bill and wrote reams about it. I knew a little bit of German, so threw a few words in. Then the examination board wrote to the school asking for a copy of the book. There was a hairy moment when my housemaster asked me, ‘Does this book exist?’ and I insisted, ‘Of course it does!’ In the end, I said it was at my grandmother’s … and ended up with a B! If I’ve got to find my way around something, I will. I’m very resourceful.

And I do think boarding school, despite the frustrations and restrictions, was the making of me. It taught me to keep pushing the boundaries and showed me my strengths and what I was good at. I might not have been academic, but the challenges helped me realise I had valuable qualities: pride, a relentless drive, the capacity to make the best of difficult situations and self-reliance.

I left school at 18, having decided that I didn’t want to go to university. University was and is a great place to become a professional – a dentist, a lawyer, a doctor – but not necessarily for someone interested in marketing or sales, which was more my line. I wanted to go straight to work and start making money. To get on that road to independence.

I’d already had Saturday jobs, even though I’d been turned down for the first job I’d applied for, at Waitrose in Enfield. I’d gone in wearing a typical 16-year-old’s get-up with a pair of high-heeled white cowboy boots, and the guy said, ‘You can’t work here! You’re far too glamorous. You wouldn’t like it.’

‘No, I really want to. I need the money and I want to earn,’ I said, but he wouldn’t employ me. I have never set foot inside a Waitrose store since that day.

Instead I’d got a job in a hairdresser’s, working on the reception desk. By the end of the first day I had completely reorganised it. I’d reworked the rotas, changed the opening hours, reset the till and redone the pricing. I was even advising people on what they should have done with their hair. I think the staff were a bit shocked – ‘You can’t do that, you don’t know anything about hair’ – but I said, ‘Well, you can tell red hair’s not going to suit that person.’ To me it was just logic; there was no real art to realising that someone should go dark instead of blonde. And once they got used to me they appreciated me and were sorry when the holidays ended and I had to go back to school.

By this point, Dad was saying to me, ‘What are we going to do with you? What job are you going to get?’ He had a friend who worked at an estate agent’s, so it was sorted: ‘You can be an estate agent.’ Logical, like me. I did go for the interview but then I thought, What am I doing here? I don’t want to be an estate agent. So I refused to take it any further. That great drive for independence was tied to a determination that no one was going to tell me what to eat for breakfast, let alone what to do with my life.

Fortunately, Aldenham had laid on lots of careers days where different companies came in and talked to us, including Saatchi & Saatchi, and LBC, the London radio station. Lots of people were interested, but whereas everybody else thought maybe they’d write to them at some point, I made sure I had all the right details before the people left and the next day I was on the phone making appointments to see them. I wasn’t going to leave things to chance.

And both companies I was interested in offered me a job. I chose Saatchi’s, leaving school on the Friday and starting work there the following Monday. Even though I was only 18, Saatchi’s put me on their graduate programme – I guess they saw something in me. I don’t think that would happen today, which is a shame.

The ’80s was a really interesting time to work at an advertising agency and I loved it. It always amazed me how people moaned about their jobs. I loved getting up and going to work, and Saatchi’s was a really free and creative environment. There was no mould – you didn’t have to be a certain person from a certain place.

From the start I wanted to take on more responsibility. I arrived early and was the last to leave. To be honest, I was never really sure if that was just because I loved it or because I had nowhere else to be. I was living in a house without central heating or a washing machine, so I was certainly in no rush to get home! What also surprised me was that some of the people I worked with spent all day thinking about what they were going to do after work. I wanted to be first in, last out and to volunteer for everything. I’d put my hand up whenever they asked for someone to do something – even if I didn’t know what they were asking for I’d say, ‘I’ll do it.’ That gave me a real edge.

I also wanted to be in the know. I wanted to meet the right people so I’d get noticed. Every Christmas, Saatchi’s had a big party and I would work out who I wanted to meet – the chairman or whoever it was – and go up to them. ‘I’m so pleased you’re here,’ I’d say, ‘because I really wanted to tell you about such and such,’ or ‘I really wanted to discuss this with you.’ I understood then something I tell a lot of women who work for me now: nobody will champion you or your career if you don’t. I never waited for someone to say, ‘You did a good job.’ I’d be saying to people, ‘Look at what I’ve done! Isn’t it great? Shouldn’t I head up the next project?’ To me, that was a more straightforward approach.

But even though I loved Saatchi’s the graduate programme was very rigid – you had to do this for six months, then that for six months, and I started to feel impatient. I think the turning point came while I was working on the Boursin cheese account. One of my jobs was to go into supermarkets and see where it was displayed, talk to the manager about why it wasn’t more prominent and file a report. Then I would go back the next week, do the same and see, over several weeks, how it was moved.

To me, that seemed the wrong way of doing things. I assumed that the prime position must be at eye level in the middle of the shelf. But when I went in on the first week all the Boursin was tucked away at the bottom where people couldn’t see it. So I simply moved it to the middle section, with its price label, and I’d go back every week and check it was still in the middle. But Saatchi’s were furious with me: that task was what the client paid them for.

I decided to move on, but with the intention of going back to Saatchi’s later. I thought if I went elsewhere and got some more experience I could reapply to Saatchi’s and miss out a year of the boring structured training. I was in such a hurry. I don’t know if that was ambition – I’ve never really understood why I was racing – but I wanted to get ahead as quickly as possible. I wanted that independence and security.

So I went from advertising and Saatchi’s to LBC, and from there to work for David Sullivan, at Sport Newspapers. Three different companies, and three different industries. In my eyes, that’s no bad thing. I meet very few women who knew at a young age what they wanted to do. Most of us find something we’re good at, then have a look around and think, You know what? I’m the best person in the room doing this so I should be running this team of people, I should be running this floor, I should be running this office, I should be running this business. Success is about making the best of your skills, whatever they are. If it’s your personality or your ability to put your back into something, make the best of it.

For me it was definitely a slow realisation of ability. I didn’t have a dying ambition to work in advertising or radio or football. I didn’t mind what it was as long as I could do it. I just wanted to find a job where I could be the best.

There is a certain story that often comes up in articles about me, when, as a 19-year-old selling radio advertising space, I pitched to David Sullivan. I had been given Asian Hour to sell, which was pretty tough – a four–five a.m. slot, the real graveyard shift. I had been handed a list of companies that spent money on advertising but who didn’t advertise on radio, and one was Sport Newspapers.

I got through to David Sullivan on the phone, and he said he wasn’t interested, that radio didn’t work. I decided I would drop off some material at his office – persistence is everything – and once I was there I decided to wait and meet him in person. I waited and waited and waited, and in the end he agreed to see me because I had waited so long. I did a very quick pitch to him and he wasn’t buying it at all, so I said, ‘Look, if you take the advertising and sales don’t go up, you don’t have to pay for it.’

He said, ‘That sounds good to me.’

I didn’t have the authority to do a deal like that, so it was a risk, but I remember thinking, Well, if it doesn’t work out, what’s the worst that can happen? They can fire me but I can always get another job – I’m only 19. I still use that kind of thinking and I have done all my life. In fact, it’s the foundation of my confidence and my ability to take risks. That episode is often considered to have been a turning point in my professional life, but in truth I think my life had been heading that way since I was a young child.

And it worked out. Sales at Sport Newspapers went up and within months Sullivan was spending more than £2 million a year on radio advertising. I was managing it all and earning more commission than all the other sales staff put together. And then he offered me a job, which I accepted. People tend to jump to conclusions about the pornography associations of Sport Newspapers, but I wasn’t working on any top-shelf titles. I was working on the Sunday Sport, and the paper was very different in those days. Nonetheless I still get criticism about that time – people say, ‘How can you stand up for women’s rights when you worked in the porn business?’ Well, the answer is that I didn’t work in the porn business. To me, that criticism is a bit like saying, ‘Sky has an adult channel, so if you work for Sky that means you work in pornography.’ Of course it doesn’t.

I realise that all this might make getting started sound easy, but there were costs – even if I thought they were worth paying. One small example: at Saatchi’s I always dressed the part. Everyone else would turn up in jeans and a T-shirt, and there would be me, immaculate in a suit. That meant that if a client came in I would always be the one selected to go and meet them, introduce them and take them round. This was a way to stand out. It would have been far more comfortable to sit in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, but that was not the person I wanted to be.

When I was a child and Dad had made a bit of money but I was still at the local comprehensive, he would pick me up from school in his Rolls-Royce. That was difficult for me because when you’re a kid you want to fit in. It made me a target. I’d say, ‘Dad!’ but he’d say, ‘What’s the problem? You should be proud.’ I remember thinking then that there was nothing worse than always being on the outside, and the urge to fit in is strong – but I guess that, ultimately, my ambition was stronger.

I had to weigh it up. When we left school my friends were off on gap years, travelling the world, or they were at university, or working in pubs while they relaxed for a while. Meanwhile I was in the office at seven a.m., and never had the energy for anything else. I didn’t get drunk after work or go clubbing at weekends. I remember David Sullivan saying to me, ‘It’s half past ten. Why are you still in the office? You’re 20 years old.’

‘Well, it’s really important, and if I don’t get it done, who’s going to do it?’

‘It can wait till tomorrow. You’ve got to have a life as well.’

But that wasn’t what I wanted. I remember that a good friend and her boyfriend were temporarily stuck for somewhere to stay, so they came to live with me in my London flat in the Docklands. She said to me, ‘Karren, you’ve never used this kitchen. There’s no kettle, no knife, no fork. I’ve opened the dishwasher and the brochure’s still inside. The oven’s still sealed up. You don’t have a life. Do you realise you don’t have a life? You eat at your desk morning, lunch and evening.’

But I didn’t care. I was doing what I wanted to do. The thought of going to a nightclub terrified me then and it terrifies me now. It’s just not me. I wanted to work and I loved work.

So that was what I did.