Town CEO Mark Ashton has paid tribute to the Blues’ “really smart owners” and they way they have allowed him and his management team to run the club without interference.
Ashton was appointed to run Town by the club’s US owners Gamechanger 20 Ltd in June 2021, shortly after the takeover.
Quizzed on how that relationship works in a wide-ranging interview with The Price of Football podcast, Ashton says they haven’t made the mistakes many other owners have in the past.
"Firstly, we’re really fortunate here because they’re very bright people, who have come into football and where for me they’ve been different to most is that they understand business, they understand sport, but when they entered this it was a new business to them,” he said.
"So, rather than try and run this business themselves, they appointed me and a management team to write a business team and deliver against that business plan. And where I’m so fortunate is that they’ve given me the oxygen to deliver the plan.
"They don’t actively get involved in the selection of a manager or player recruitment etc, they let us write the plan, they sign the plan off, they sign the money off that needs to be put into the business to deliver that plan and then they challenge against key performance indicators on the way through. They’re fantastic.
"Where we as an industry have seen challenges at times is, and I say this very simply. I’ve been doing this a long time and let’s be really clear. I learn every single day, 30 to 40 years I’ve been in this industry, you don’t stop learning.
"If I jumped into an aeroplane tomorrow and tried to fly that plane, the one thing I can promise you that I’m going to do is crash it because I haven’t got the expertise to fly it.
"And yet people come from outside football into our industry, emotionally led at times and then wonder why they can’t straight away run the football clubs because these are very unique organisations.
"We’ve seen that happen time and time again, so I’m really fortunate to have really smart owners, who back the management team, challenge the management team, support the management team, but don’t interfere in the nuances of running the business.
"And I think that’s a real advantage for us because if you look at this football club compared with a lot of football clubs in the pyramid at the moment, we have stability.
"We’re not going to chop and change our manager every five minutes, we’re going to grow, we have a plan to move forward and we’ll stick to the plan.
"There is not erratic decision-making, it’s calm, it’s considered, it’s focused and it’s progressive. So we’re really, really fortunate with regard to that.”
And Ashton says sticking to the plan is the key to avoiding coming a cropper in the Championship.
"The problem with the Championship is really simple,” he added. "It’s emotion. You’re in a division which is one step away from the golden ticket, one step away from the Premier League where everyone wants to be, and it’s one step away from that huge financial gain of getting across the line and into the Premier League.
"And what happens is, you have a plan and a lot of clubs don’t stick to the plan in the Championship because they start to get close to either the play-offs or automatic promotion.
"And then the model changes because they overstretch and overreach, and I can understand that and I’ve been guilty of that in the past.
"But you’ve got to stick to your plan. That obsession with trying to get to the Premier League causes logical, sensible people with a lot of money in their own businesses in their own right, to make emotionally led decisions, which can be very dangerous. It’s a tough place to be.”