WHAT IS YOUR VISION FOR CARLISLE UNITED?

I want the club to do everything it can to be the best that we can. I want the club to do things that make the supporters proud of their club, want to come and watch us, and enjoy coming, and be excited by it

We're a community club, so I want us to make a difference in the community and earn the respect of the community. As a business, football is the top priority and we've got to do all we can to get as much resources into the football part of the club, to maximise our chances of success.

I want us to operate united, together, all with the same aim, which is not always the case in clubs. We have to work together within the club, and also out there in the community. We can't afford to be isolated. You've got to engage with fans, businesses and the community. They are the big, longer-term areas of what I think 'good' looks like for Carlisle United.

When you get into the detail, we need to move up the pyramid, up the leagues, which is what football is all about - winning games, being exciting. But we've got to do it in a way that makes us attractive as a club, so people want to come here to either work or to play for us.

For football clubs to be successful they need the right people at the right time, and good people. You need good, appropriate plans that fit your club. You've then got to execute your plans and do things that drive you forward, and you've got to do that in a good culture.

I believe in getting things right over a long time and trying to avoid boom and bust, stop and go. You need sustainability and consistency. That comes from having high standards, a good philosophy and plan, and improving constantly.

DOES THE CLUB NEED A CLEARLY-DEFINED VISION, FOR EXAMPLE A FIVE-YEAR PLAN?

I think you need to have a clear view of what you want to achieve and how you're going to go about doing it. Planning in football is almost looked upon as something not to do. Those clubs that say they're planning to do something in a certain way, they're almost looked on as too corporate.

I don't think you have to spend endless hours doing this kind of stuff, but you do need to have a clear view of where you're going and how you're going to get there.

Day to day, you need to have the detail that says, 'this is what we're going to do'. Football's quite fast-moving. If you don't have that, you can quickly get off track and lose what you're aiming for, and what your club is about, and what you stand for.

Having good plans and ways of working give you the foundations and keep you on track. That's how I see it. If you had any business and said, 'We're turning over £Xm', and when you were asked what your plan is, you said 'Oh, we haven't got one, we're just flying by the seat of our pants,' you'd say that's not a way to run that business. But it's very much the norm in clubs.

It's not my way. I'm a strong believer in having the right plans, so you can say this is what we're going to do in the next six months, next three months, this month, this week - but this is overall where we're heading to.

SO IS THAT SOMETHING YOU'RE KEEN TO ESTABLISH - A WRITTEN PLAN?

Yeah. It's important that all fans and the club knows the direction they're moving in. I think most of the time it can be obvious about how you operate, but I don't think there's anything to be feared in sharing that with fans.

One thing clubs often do with supporters is not give them enough credit for being able to understand what's going on in their club and what's happening in the game. The more information you can share with them, the more understanding they can get, it helps everybody move together.

So it is important, knowing what your club stands for. The clubs that have strong identity, you do know what they stand for, you can see how they operate, in a consistent fashion. They're the ones who tend to get it right. The ones who don't have an identity, you look and say I don't really know what's going on there. The clubs I look at as successful, I and this club can learn from.

CAN YOU GIVE EXAMPLES OF CLUBS CARLISLE COULD LEARN FROM?

I could give you a longer list of clubs and say I don't want to copy that! A lot of it's not to do with how much cash you've got. I look at a club like Southampton, they've got a very clear identity in how they operate, real good structures, it allows them to continue to develop and improve in the long-term, able to withstand their players going but then replace them. They're an example of good practice in the Premier League - they've got a great reputation.

Down into other leagues, other clubs are very good in the community, how they engage with their fans. People like Doncaster are excellent with their fans. There are people winning awards for their community work, like Wycombe. It's not all about size - it's mentality, doing what you can do.

EARLIER THIS YEAR CARLISLE'S OWNERS SAID THEY DIDN'T NEED A CHIEF EXECUTIVE, AND BEFORE THAT THEY INSISTED A NEW INVESTOR WOULD BRING THEIR OWN PERSON IN. YOU HAVE JOINED REGARDLESS OF THOSE COMMENTS - SO WHY DO YOU THINK YOU WERE YOU HIRED?

I think, in the past, the day-to-day leadership role in the club was undertaken by a managing director for a number of years - an unpaid role, that didn't divert resources from football. The general approach to running football clubs is spend as much as you can on the front line, the player wage bill, and everything else is secondary. That was consistent with that approach.

John Nixon then stepped aside quite a while ago, the club recruited Suzanne Kidd as finance director and Phil King as sales and marketing director. So they started the process longer ago, of moving to a different kind of model with a full-time executive management team.

John backed out, and since then they've come to realise, notwithstanding the contribution Phil and Suzanne made, you need somebody in a club to bring it all together, someone to be more of a figurehead and deal with the day-to-day issues you have in a club. I think it's brave, and they deserve some credit for taking the decision to try and come down this route and appoint me.

Financially, it comes at a cost, and it's an investment the club has made in doing this, and with Suzanne and Phil. That's been possible by new monies coming into the club from the Football League, and solidarity payments from the Premier League. So it's not detracting from the front line.

Part of my remit is to make the club grow and be financially better, to almost pay for myself. That goes without saying. It's part of the job. The club's evolving, it's changing, I think that the game is changing, it's fast-moving, and what works now might not work in six months, a year, two years.

With the need to manage on the field, off the field and all the aspects of a business from retail, tickets, lotteries, community, there's a lot to do. You need good people to implement your plan, and to do that you need strong management.

You only have to look at the clubs and businesses who are really successful, and they all have a common theme of strong, good management. When I worked dealing with companies that were in, or heading for, trouble, on the list of reasons for failure and under-performance was quality of management, and investment in management.

WHEN AND HOW DID THE PROCESS START FOR RECRUITING YOU - AND WHAT WERE YOUR PERCEPTIONS OF THE CLUB?

The process started probably in the week or so leading to the final game of [last] season against Notts County. I took a call and was asked to have a conversation about the club, then I went to the Notts County game. We had other conversations after that fixture, and things moved on from there.

My perceptions of the club before I came? I knew the club well from competing against it previously. I always felt it was a very tough place to come here, very tough. That's not based on 'Carlisle's tough on a Tuesday night' myths. It's actual experience, of being on the end of some tough results, and always in a competitive game.

Football's a small community. Even if you're in different divisions you have an awareness of what's going on, which clubs are travelling in which direction, and obviously Carlisle had been in League One, to Wembley, had some good times, then all of a sudden were flirting with going out of the League again.

But then Keith Curle comes in, and steadies the ship, stops the problem and starts to rebuild. I looked at it as a club that turned the corner on the pitch, and with lots of potential to do better than it is now. As a one-club town it has the potential to do better off the field, and given the location, I always felt there was so much potential and opportunity around the club off the field to really make a difference.

Probably a club punching under its weight, but having the track record of doing significantly better. One you could look at and say: 'Let's get it back to where it's usually been, and see where we can take it from there.'

AT THAT NOTTS COUNTY GAME, THE TEAM WAS WINNING 5-0, YET SOME FANS WERE CHANTING AGAINST ONE OF THE OWNERS. WHAT DID YOU MAKE OF THAT?

I was sat next to John Nixon, by no real design - I just sat next to him. Clearly, you couldn't not notice [the chanting]. Even though I wasn't connected - I only knew John from afar, meeting him at meetings really - I found it really uncomfortable, a little bit upsetting, and really sad; a time when the fans and club should have been really enjoying that final-day hurrah, great performance, some cracking goals, it wasn't like that.

Sat next to John, it really hurt him. I can understand why. Fortunately I haven't had to suffer that often in the past. I've had fans not liking me but nowhere near on the scale of that. I felt that was really, really tough, and it said a lot about the need to do something different.

That put a marker down. I think credit should go to the main shareholder Andrew Jenkins, and John, and Steven Pattison, who brought me in - they've looked at that and said we need to do something to deal with this.

Hopefully the next time we take the field in a competitive match and we're winning 5-0, people will be cheering and focusing on the game, and not trouble off the field.

SINCE THEN, WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED ABOUT THE REASONS WHY PEOPLE WERE CHANTING THOSE THINGS, AND WHAT CAN BE ADDRESSED?

It's an interesting one. I've spoken to lots of people, been to lots of fans' meetings, and I think the circumstances have arisen where there's a great deal of frustration that had got built up, and pent up, and needed a release, and the focal point of that became one individual.

I can understand. I've been a football supporter, I've been frustrated myself, you need a way of venting that. Why it's arisen? I think all kinds of explanations have been given to me, but the fundamental point is the feeling the club isn't travelling in the direction the fans might want, on and off the field, and they want a different approach to it.

That links into all kinds of things. Performance on the field helps, but it isn't everything - you're winning 5-0 and the frustration's still there. So it's not just about winning football matches. It's about everything else around the club. We've taken that on board and have got to listen to what our supporters are saying, and do the things that make them feel more connected to their club.

Engaging more, talking more, giving more information, interviews like this help, going to fans forums help, and sharing what we're trying to do here. As I said to the guys when I came in - in normal circumstances, what does 'good' look like that to a fan? They'll say they want owners who love their club, preferably local guys who know what the community spirit's about, people who are going to be in it for the long term and aren't just fly-by-night. They like a bit of fan ownership, so they've got a stake in the club.

You look at these things and Carlisle ticks loads of those boxes, yet there's a disconnect between that and the reality. That leads me to think there's some issues to fix. But actually, fundamentally, this is a decent club with good potential, and we just need to get it back on track.

THE DEBT TO ANDREW JENKINS REMAINS SIGNIFICANT - HOW DO YOU VIEW THAT AS A SITUATION FOR RESOLVING?

I think the steps the Football League clubs took, especially at League One and League Two level, to get their financial houses in order over the last four or five years, are starting to bear fruit for clubs at those levels. It's stemmed the losses, and the haemorrhaging of cash, and brought a real financial discipline.

Salary caps, percentages of income, give a discipline to a club to stop those boom and bust years, which is good. In the longer term you would expect that clubs like Carlisle should have the opportunity to be less reliant on owners putting cash in.

The fact of the matter is, periodically, football clubs in Leagues One and Two need owners to put cash in, whether it's to deal with problems on the pitch, stop a fall in position, get better players in, emergency, remedial action, which the club has had to do, which Andrew Jenkins has funded, as the club's gone down the leagues.

Or, whether you get the sense your time is right to get promoted, and want that extra push and impetus, there are also occasions when you're relying on owners.

As you go further up the league, the reliance on owners becomes exponentially more important. At this level, the club needs to aspire to be a viable club that doesn't need the support of its owners except in emergency situations. You do that by growing the club, generating more income, and you do that by controlling your football costs and getting maximum value for money from them, and not wasting the cash you do have, than banging on an owner's door.

My view is, owners, whoever they are, are there as a safety net. That's what this club needs to focus on. Owners can then be better used to find investment in development of their club, whether in facilities or the longer term. Using owners as a piggy-bank to try and buy success at this level doesn't quite work as a model.

Andrew has been subsidising the club to help it in difficult times, in providing loans, and with any loan, they've got to be repaid at some point. But with the best owners, they get their repayment when the club can afford it, and they're understanding, which we're fortunate to have here.

Plain and simply, there's no institution that's going to lend the club any cash, no bank, it just doesn't happen. We're fortunate in that way to have someone prepared to do that.

IS IT NOT ALSO, THOUGH, A POTENTIAL OBSTACLE TO INVESTMENT, THAT DEBT, WHICH ANDREW JENKINS WANTS REPAYING?

My experience of investing in any business is the right owners and the right investors find a way to do a deal that works for everybody. There's no winners and losers. When you get into a situation with investment where there's a winner and loser, that rings alarm bells.

When I was involved in businesses that needed real investment to stop them going bust, you used to look at the motivation for people. Speaking from experience, I know debt that is in football clubs isn't necessarily an obstacle. The investment that's coming in, who's providing it, and the terms of it, are more important than the legacy sat in the balance sheet to be dealt with.

If you get the right investor and the right deal, those things can be easily overcome. Because actually, when you loan anybody anything, you do it on the basis you're going to get the money back.

It doesn't surprise business people when they're doing a deal that if there's some debt to be repaid, they've got to repay it. That's normal business practice.

*Tomorrow: Clibbens on the 'billionaire' and fan representation at United