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There's no getting away from the fact that Karren Brady is a babe. She is also an extraordinary business person, becoming the youngest Managing Director of a UK PLC at 23 and turning around the fortunes of the then ailing Birmingham City Football Club. Now the Vice Chairman at West Ham United FC and Lord Sugar’s right-hand woman on the BBC series The Apprentice, it is clear the ambition and drive that got Brady the top job at Birmingham City in the first place show no sign of waning.

The testosterone-fuelled world of football can sometimes mean that being an attractive woman makes it difficult to be taken seriously. In Brady's first press conference at Birmingham, for example, one tabloid reporter asked her for her "vital statistics". What the football industry needs is more professionalism, she retorted, adding: "When you come back in ten years time... you will find a club playing in the highest and best league in the world with a great profile, setting professional business standards that other people will follow."

As she reminded the London Business Forum, Brady made good on her promise, increasing the average gate of the Club from 6,000 to a sell-out capacity of over 30,000 and in 2009 Birmingham City was sold for £82million. It was about time she was regarded primarily as a successful boss," she said. "I really don't see myself as a woman in a man's world. […But] I do see myself as an ambitious businessperson who truly was given the challenge and chance of a lifetime to run Birmingham and I grabbed that with both hands."

The magnitude of Brady's achievements certainly can't be overstated. In 1993, Birmingham City was on the verge of collapse, with dilapidated facilities and few high-quality players or staff. "There was no realisation this was a business," she said. "The chief scout was also the catering manager. And there were no computers."

Free cash was so scarce that the staff had begun to barter for basic products and services. They might swap a new typewriter for a season ticket, Brady said. "And I'll never forget inheriting a contra-deal that exchanged an executive box for black bin-bags." She joked that in life there are people who make things happen, people who watch what happens and people who wonder what happened; "And, very sadly, Birmingham found itself in this third category."

The club's ground, St Andrew's, was a dump, she continued. Parts of it were condemned and closed for safety reasons. "I remember standing on the kop and looking down and there was a toilet block to the left, and the roof to this toilet block had blown off. And I remember standing there thinking, 'Well, the football's not really that good, but at least there's something mildly entertaining going on,' because people could see right in."

Brady had no way to compete directly with rival clubs nearby, so she focused on turning Birmingham into a "community club", with initiatives such as "Kids A Quid", which allowed entry to under-16s for £1 each; a stand where families could sit together ("now copied everywhere"); and free education services for the local community including "back to work" and "healthy living" courses.

At the same time, she set about sacking the wrong people and bringing in the right ones. Recruitment and training were geared, as they are today, towards three key qualities: determination, enthusiasm ("the one ingredient I always look for and... the only one you can't teach people") and an understanding of each individual's contribution to the business as a whole. "Everybody has to understand everybody else's role," she stressed. That's especially important in an organisation where an 18-year-old working in the ticket office might earn £12,000 a year while an 18-year-old on the pitch might earn £12,000 a week.

The club's guiding principle for training sounds harsh: "Teaching people to do the things that need to be done when they need to be done, whether they like it or not." However, Brady explained, it's based on encouragement and motivation rather than rule-by-diktat. "I was at a conference for top FTSE100 companies and we were talking about staff motivation, attitude, training," she said. "And one of the guys there... said: 'Oh, we don't bother with anything like that here.' I said, 'Well, what do you do then to motivate your staff?' He said: 'Oh, we operate the FIFO principle.' And I said, 'What is that?' And he said, 'Fit in or fuck off.' For some small businesses, I'm told that's very effective."

If you want to gauge the motivation levels of your staff, she suggested, the most "honest and quick" way is to look at your annual sick-leave. In 1993, the average amount of time taken off ill by each member of staff at Birmingham City was sickeningly high. So one of Brady's first priorities was to get the staff to buy into her vision. This way, she said, they would "really [have] an understanding of what it took to work at Birmingham, and where we wanted to go, and what their individual role was in it."

At the same time, she stressed the following maxim: "What makes a business fantastic is not the hours you put in. It's what you put into those hours when you're at the business that really, really changes it." The club won awards for sick-leave reduction. "Annual sick leave at Birmingham is one-quarter of one day a year," Brady reported proudly, and this is based on a six day working week.

Birmingham City’s performance rocketed in every department after Brady took charge. Today, it sells out its tickets for every match. It also has 64 executive boxes - more than Liverpool and Everton combined; a fast-growing merchandising business; a media business that publishes its own newspapers and magazines; an events business; and a financial services business that markets Blues-branded credit cards, mortgages and other products.

It was a turnaround made possible by certain leadership qualities that percolated from the top down, Brady suggested. She aspired to a set of key "ingredients" that she believed were present in only the very best businesspeople and she tried to inspire her middle-managers in turn.

The first of these ingredients was the ability to thrive under adversity, she suggested. "Martin Luther King sums it up for me when he says, 'The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort but where he stands in times of challenge,'" she said. "You have to... know what to do when you don't know what to do, to be able to stand up for your business."

Ambition was also important, she argued "because without ambition, nobody ever started anything." It is the "spark you see in clearly successful people... And I always say the toughest thing about being a success is that you've got to keep on being a success, and the people that keep on being a success are those with ambition."

Determination was a related but discrete characteristic, in her view, and the one to which she attributed her own achievements primarily. "Before you're successful, you will meet either temporary defeat or total failure," she said. "Almost everybody has. And at that point most people walk away because that's the easy thing to do. The hard thing to do is to stay, to pick yourself up, and to get on with the job at hand." A role model in this category, she said, was Peter Jones, the mobile phone magnate and Dragon's Den panellist, who earned his first millions by the age of 21 only to lose it all at 22.

The fourth quality was attitude, she said. "I say to people all the time: 'If you don't like something, change it, but if you can't change it, you have to change your attitude to it.'" Brady sits on the boards of several companies, and says she has to remind other executives continually that "to change something and to change it for the better are two really different things." Before you make a decision, you should ask yourself what the worst-case outcome will be, she advised, as this will give you a better idea of the risks involved and a clearer sense of your appetite for those risks.

Next was "direction". This, Brady explained, is about ensuring you "put [people] in the best and most suitable job for them and bring the best out of them." At the age of 18, she confessed, "I actually believed that the higher you got up the ladder, the less you did until you got to the chairman and then your only dilemma every day was where to have lunch." To prevent her new recruits from making the same mistake, she forces them to shadow her on their first day at the office. This way, "they understand that to run a business takes a huge amount of leadership, and ambition, and determination, and positive attitude." Once you've become a leader, she added, direction is about demonstrating your vision to people so that they want to align themselves with it.

Finally, she said, you've got to have the ability to be positive and stay positive. "And what I mean by that is having the strength of character to stay the length of time it takes to run a business... I always think that positive successful people don't say, 'Well, I would have stayed, but...' They always say, 'I'm going to stay until...'"

That was it for Brady's list of excellence benchmarks. "Most of us only manage one or two," she said, "but the really successful people in this country have all six and I've been lucky to meet some of those that have all six." However, she added, there were a couple more strengths that she felt, in her case, had proven vital. For example, time-management skills. "I always believe that most working women develop two personalities [for home and work]. And I think the absolute trick is to stop one of those personalities draining the life out of the other." Above all, she concluded, her success was down to one thing: perseverance.