Stan Harris admits he was “shocked” by St Johnstone’s financial state when he stepped in as CEO in May 2023.
Harris, who spent 15 years as a director at McDiarmid Park before standing down for health reasons in August 2021, was brought back by owner Geoff Brown to take control of the club’s balance sheet after his son, Steve Brown’s, stint as chairman.
What Harris found caught him by surprise – and amounted to an astonishing £2.1 million operating loss for the financial year.
It took him just a year to turn the ship around ahead of US lawyer Adam Webb’s takeover, with the club recently announcing a £110,000 profit in 2024.
And speaking on the Courier’s St Johnstone podcast, the Spoony Chop, Harris lifted the lid on his return to the club.
He said: “I’d been away for a couple of years when Steve decided to step down.
“Me and Geoff were speaking and the conversation was fairly blase, I said: ‘Look, if you’re needing a hand to shift the club, to get it in order, just give me a shout.’ And he did.
“We only thought it would be two or three months, but it ended up going 14 months, 15 months, round-about there. So it took a bit longer.
“But when we came back in, the issues that we found… it was a bit problematic because we’d been kind of overspending.
“I was shocked. We’d always been a club that had been there or thereabouts. We’d make £100k profit, we’d make £100k loss… it was always round-about zero.
“To come back in and find out that you’ve got an underlying £2.1 million loss… I was actually stunned.
“It’s hard to explain how we felt. I’m not sure Geoff knew and I’m not sure Steve actually knew what was going on because Steve had taken a back seat to allow others to manage it for them.
“I said at the time it would probably take two or three seasons to get it back on track again.
“We did manage to get it back on track in a year, but there were underlying tail-winds that helped that.”
Harris joined Spoony Chop regulars, Stuart Cosgrove, Eric Nicolson and Sean Hamilton on this week’s episode, with the conversation spanning the entirety of his time at the club.
The Spoony Chop, with special guest Stan Harris, can be listened to via all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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