As I shake the hand of Fran Smith, St Johnstone’s new chief executive officer, he informs me that in one of his previous lives as an international class hurdler, a legendary reporter from this paper - who shall remain anonymous, but whose name rhymes with Smug Dylan - once questioned his bottle after he failed to qualify for the Commonwealth Games.
It is an inauspicious start, but thankfully, one we overcome. As it turns out, overcoming hurdles in both a literal and figurative sense has been a feature of Smith’s journey from the athletics world to the McDiarmid Park boardroom.
“I'm pinching myself, you know?” Smith said.
“I am sitting here as a CEO of an SPFL club. It's just unbelievable.”
And yet, as he settles into his stride and sets out his vision for the club, or rather, how he will look to contribute to and help deliver new owner Adam Webb’s vision, it becomes increasingly believable that he was an obvious choice for the role.
Humble in origin and outlook, but with a strong sense of who he is, and an ambition to achieve. It could almost be the St Johnstone mission statement. Though, Perth hasn’t always been home.
“I grew up in Dunfermline, supporting Dunfermline Athletic,” he said.
“We grew up with my dad who was a painter, my mum who was a nurse, my sister and my brother.
“My brother Callum was a professional footballer for Dunfermline, and played for Brechin, Forfar, Montrose, Kelty Hearts and many other junior football teams. He’s currently the first team coach at Bonnyrigg Rose.
“So, I've been around football my whole life and my brother came through academy systems, so I have really a good background in that.
“I’m an ex-international athlete. I've worked for international businesses, I've worked with the MOD for over 16 years and then I worked for an American company. So that's probably where the links with Adam are pretty strong, because I've dealt with American owners of businesses.”
Just as valuable as that grounding in life may prove to be in his new position, so too will be the grounding in St Johnstone and the club’s place in the Perth area that he received in his previous role.
“I came up here as the chief executive of Saints in the Community, the club’s charity,” he said.
“The last two and a half years has been a massive journey for everybody in the organisation. We've really seen ourselves grow as an organisation in the community and we've won the Commitment to the Community Award two years running at the Perthshire Business Star Awards.
“We had 20,000 attendees at the sessions last year. So that shows you that people connect with the club through their charity. And I think that's important for me to be able to use our charity to make sure that we are supporting all our fans across the piece.
“The chief executive of the council, Thomas Glen, and I have spoken on numerous occasions about what the football club and the charity can do within this community. And I think that's really important that you've got the leader of the council who's really interested in what we are doing out here because the club's a major player within this area.
“And I think it's still growing. It's been good, but there's still a lot of growth that can happen. And I think it's really important that we use our community department and the sense of community to help drive that Monday to Friday thing.
“We have menopause groups going on here. We've got prostate fit groups going on here. And that's all people who are linked to the football club as well.”
The ‘Monday to Friday thing’ that Smith references will be a key part of his remit, as he looks to find ways to boost revenue for the club that will ultimately spill over and benefit the football team on a Saturday.
Whereas other CEOs might have their attention divided across all aspects of their clubs, from driving attendances to negotiating signings and contracts, Smith’s remit will be to laser in on ways to get more people using the McDiarmid Park facility, and not only on matchdays.
He is cognisant of the fact that both he and Webb have big shoes to fill after the stellar job their respective predecessors did in their roles in Geoff Brown and Stan Harris, but says he is undaunted by the task at hand, and can see areas where more can be done to unlock the club’s potential.
“The role is massive, being the chief executive of this football club,” he said.
“But we’ve got great people within here. Roddy Grant, Gus MacPherson, who is going to deal with the football side of things. But I have a real business brain.
“Having that sporting background, that drive, commitment, passion, that's going to help drive this business side.
“We need to generate more income Monday to Friday, not just for Saturday. The main part of this role for me is to increase revenue to make sure that we can put more players on the park and then see wins and more supporters coming in the stadium.
“We’re unique. We're a one football club city. And Perth is a wonderful city. The guys around the football club are fantastic.
“What Geoff and the previous regime did was amazing. It's a hard act to follow. The guys that have ran the club for many years have done a tremendous job. The club's in a fantastic place.
“It's about driving, continuing what we're doing to be successful, but also looking at the growth avenues.
“You see that social connection that the supporters in the city have with the football club. But we want to see more people out here on a match day. We try to make it affordable for all, we’re one of the cheapest grounds within Scottish football for families and that's important to us.
“But can we produce fan zones, can we do other things that are going to make things a little bit more exciting? The fact that we play over the winter is an issue of course, because it's always cold. We're never going to get people out here in the middle of winter to listen to a Caribbean band on a stage at the back of the Ormond Stand, you know?
“But I think it just needs a wee bit of help. It's starting that journey. If you look at our season ticket campaign this year, it was called ‘From Journeys Old and New’.
“So, we've got our oldest fan at 93 now, and then it was one of our youngest fans coming through the door with his dad. That's really what this club's about, it's the journey from young to old.
“I think that's important for us. The 200 kids that are playing football out there on the astroturf, for example, we want to try to get them in the stadium and really enjoying supporting St. Johnstone from a young age. And then you grow into a supporter and start seeing it.
“It's important that we reach out to those young fans and try and help those families where we can. I'm not saying we're going to give out free tickets all the time or anything, but we'll try and get people in here. Under 12s are free in our stadium, for example.”
The age-old problem that has afflicted the attendances of clubs of St Johnstone’s size the length and breadth of Scotland is the pull that Glasgow’s big two have, even on those who may live hundreds of miles away.
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But Smith senses there is an opening for clubs like the Saints to exploit a general softening of the allegiances to either Celtic or Rangers that may have been passed between generations, with parents increasingly likely these days to seek a more family friendly environment for their kids to watch their football in.
“That's a massive opportunity,” he said.
“If we can get the kids through the door and they enjoy supporting St. Johnstone and they enjoy wearing that strip around the town, then hopefully we can see more and more people coming.
“Adam's got an initiative that we're going to work with the community on, where we're going to work with a school a match, and try and get some tickets out to schools. Again, the community do that, but we're actually going to target them, and then potentially look at other opportunities that we can do for them.”
What it will all hopefully feed into is the long-term success of St Johnstone, but one of the key messages from both Smith and Webb is that home isn’t built in a day. Growth is important, but tending to what they have, equally so.
Foreign owners coming into Scottish football are generally eyed with a degree of scepticism, but there will be no grand pronouncements of toppling the bigger city clubs as the new ‘third force’, or money being spent that the club doesn’t have in pursuit of quick wins.
Smith explained: “When I sat down and spoke with Adam and the other two investors that were here at the time to talk about taking on this role, I left the room feeling actually, you know what? That's what I want to do.
“They've got a vision to make this a real community family club, even more than what it is just now, which really excites me.
“There will be people who are scared, people who might not think the changes are for the better, but once they happen and we embrace them, then hopefully those changes will come to fruition and we'll see increased commercial income, we'll see increased supporters in the stadium, that sort of stuff.
“It's about us growing sustainably along with the revenue income growing up. Adam was clear that we weren’t going to be that third force. We’ll grow, and who knows? In three, four, five seasons, we could be that third force, but we'll grow sustainably with increased revenue.
“It is all about that sustainable growth. I think everyone has that aligned vision. We run on a tight budget, and everyone's aware of that.
“Any transfer movement is always players out for players in, there's no magical money pot anywhere, we've got to make that income somehow.”
One area that could aid that growth is the development and eventual selling on of their own talent, with Smith noting the recent Scottish FA report into the ‘transition phase’ for players between the ages of 16 and 21 with interest.
Fran Franczak is the latest youth prospect at the club to receive international recognition with a call-up to the Poland under-18 squad, and in-keeping with the theme of building upon the solid foundations that are already in place rather than tearing the house down and starting again, Smith believes Saints can make more of their own talent pipeline.
“We’ve got a great youth academy,” he said.
“Alistair Stevenson's done an amazing job throughout the years. We've got players in that youth academy who are assets to the club. They are the next paydays.
“And we've got a manager in Craig Levein who doesn't mind taking a risk. He did it at Hearts, he did it at Dundee United. I think the last few seasons it's been hard to take that risk because we've been battling relegation, but we've got two or three youngsters in the squad just now.
“We've got Fran who's just been called up by Poland, and it just shows we've got some real assets in that academy. We've got a cracking academy there.
“If we can think of those creative ways to bring in some revenue, that will then allow that to grow.
“Is there an opportunity to bring in an astroturf partner who's going to have their naming rights around the astroturf, naming rights around stadium, things like that? There could be those kind of growth areas.
“The women's team is important to us as well. We’ve got that whole Saints family. We've got the club, we've got the women's team, we've got the academy, we've got the community trust.
“All four of us need to be working really closely together and really driving what we can.
“There are organisations out there for instance who might want to come and be a front of shirt sponsor for us, but actually part of that front of shirt sponsorship deal is that they pay an element to the women's team, an element to the academy, and then an element to the community trust where they can hit their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) and their ECG (Economy for the Common Good).
“So that to me is the important part, making sure that when we're growing sustainably, we're growing all our Saints family.
“Adam’s vision is that it is important that the Saints family all work together. Family is the key word. We are a family club.”
Under Webb and Smith’s watch, then, that much won’t change. But what will? What will I see if I come back to McDiarmid Park in say, five years’ time?
“Well, Adam's vision, is what you're going to see hopefully,” he said.
“You're going to see a sports bar down the stairs. We're going to see more supporters in the stand. We're going to see hopefully a different and more improved hospitality, though I don't know how you would do that because we're already amazing at it.
“We're going to see more links to the community, more activities on match days going on that are going to excite people to come along.
“Over the next five years we're going to see steady, controlled growth and that's important. We can't just go from this to this, because then we’re not a sustainable club.
“So, we need to grow, sustain, grow and sustain.”
Unlike in his previous life then, Smith is convinced that a slow and steady approach will win the race. He knows there are hurdles ahead, but he seems to have the bottle to take them on, after all.
