Guradian: Karren Brady is telling a room full of Year 10 students that they need to think about how they’re going to make a living, and the kids are flocking. They form an orderly scrum, lobbing in business ideas, going into fullApprentice mode on her. One girl shows her a book she’s written about gangs, and when Brady pulls a wallet from her handbag and fishes out a fiver, her friends can’t believe it. “I’m buzzing,” says Kapinga, 14, on Brady’s sheer presence in her school. “It’s crazy, Miss.” Another pitches a soccer camp idea and Brady asks if he’s thought about insurance. There’s always something. Come up with a plan, she says seriously, work out your costs.

“I think young people respond much better to openness and frankness and practical stuff than speeches,” she says later, once she’s disentangled herself from the last teen entrepreneur. We’re sitting in an office in St Mark’s Academy in Mitcham, south London, where Brady has come to offer tips on how to write a good CV (“you shouldn’t put socialising first”) and getting work experience. She’s an ambassador for Barclays’ LifeSkills programme, which works with schools, employers and young people, fixing them up with work placements and running advice sessions like this one. She’s good at it, discussing the finer points of how you list your exam results (start with the best and work down). She listens, encourages, surprises the kids with anecdotes: her first job was in a salon, sweeping up hair. Brady doesn’t mention that by the end of her first day she’d reorganised the hairdressers’ rota, changed the opening hours and reworked the pricing.

At the age of 19, working for Saatchi & Saatchi, she walked into Sport newspapers publisher David Sullivan’s office to sell him some radio ad space. Soon he was spending more than £2m a year and she was earning more commission than all the sales staff put together. Four years later, aged 23, she convinced Sullivan to buy Birmingham City Football Club and let her run it. At her first press conference, a reporter asked for her vital statistics: no one took the appointment very seriously, at first. Today, as well as despairing at idiocy on The Apprentice, she still works for Sullivan as the vice-chair of West Ham. A recent article described her as his “enforcer” (“doesn’t bother me,” she says, “you have to have a very thick skin to run a business”).

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