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If the UK is going to compete in the future, we need to up our game

Barry-Leahey-Playdale-Playgrounds-MD
Barry Leahey has experience leading big teams

British business leaders need to invest in themselves and their people, believes Barry Leahey, if they want a place on the global stage.

During a typical working week, Barry Leahey MBE will put in around 80 hours – splitting his time between steering the ship at Playdale Playgrounds, where he is both MD and CEO, mentoring up-and-coming business leaders, and working on his own personal development.

He’s always worked this hard, having first embraced the idea of giving 100 per cent to whatever he is tasked with while training as an elite athlete during his childhood.

“At 13 I would go for a run before school, come home, deliver the local paper, go training and then come back and do my homework,” he said. “Having that competitive sport background gave me a work ethic and a desire to win that I went on to take into business. I’ve made thousands of mistakes and I got beat hundreds of times from a very early age, and that built resilience.”

Barry has been with 43-year old family business Playdale since 2004, and was with the company when the last economic crisis hit.

“We knew the UK market was about to fall off a cliff,” he said, “and we knew we needed to diversify. But because we couldn’t diversify with different products in the UK, we decided to take our products worldwide instead.”

The goal was to find six new markets. Today, Playdale is in 51, with Barry having personally visited around 60 countries (for at least a week each) over the past decade. He says this has been hugely educational – if slightly worrying.

“It’s given me a global perspective about what business is and our beliefs in the UK, and how competitive the world is,” he said. “If the UK is going to compete in the future, we need to up our game.”

He believes that the “arrogance” of Brits which emerges every four years when we say we’re going to win the World Cup extends to our approach to international business.

“What’s been happening is that the world has been plundering our universities for 40 years and sending all their best students here,” he said. “Don’t think these people aren’t doing anything when they get back home. They’re building amazing factories, they’ve got amazing equipment, they’ve got clever individuals and they’re creating incredible products.”

To counter this, he says, the UK needs to start “covering itself in glory” because our global standing has been tainted over the past four years by Brexit.

“We’ve got to really look inwards and say, ‘How do we make ourselves look the best we can possibly be to the world?’,” he said.

Be the Business, he feels, is just the vehicle to help with this. “Some of the things that we’ve achieved during the pandemic, the way we’ve helped people’s businesses to pivot, has been transformational,” he said. “What we need to get business leaders to do now is invest in themselves and their people so that they can fight on a global stage.”

Barry is an honorary teaching fellow in entrepreneurship, strategy and innovation at Lancaster University Management School, where he is also entrepreneur in residence. Prior to Playdale, he worked in senior sales roles for Yell and the Caudwell Group. He received his MBE for services to international trade in 2017, and has featured on the Telegraph’s list of Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders.

Quick-fire questions

What is your business inspiration?

I have the best job on the planet in that I sell fun all over the world, and that inspires me. In terms of instrumental people, in recent years a guy called Kevin Roberts, ex CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, was a mentor of mine.

Do you have a personal productivity tip?

Do something to make yourself or your systems more efficient every single day. Those small incremental gains will add up to huge transformational processes.

What do you think that businesses need to be watching out for in the near future?

For small businesses, it’s all about ensuring that they are lean in their processes, and that they digitise. They’ve got to automate. Yes, AI is coming, but there are still too many businesses using paper. We are way behind the curve compared to the rest of the world.

What’s the best piece of business advice that you’ve ever been given?

Be real, be transparent, be honest ­­– it’s just something I’ve picked up over the years. Some people in the UK are in a class of their own when it comes to bullshit – if we could get medals for it at the Olympics, I think that’s where we’d top the table.

If you’d gone down a completely different career path, what would you have been?

A competitive, world-class athlete. Or, all the way through my teenage years I wanted to be in the SAS because I love being pushed to my limits.

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