Anyone visiting the commercial director of Leeds United and planning to loiter outside his office in the hope of catching a glimpse of a star player will be sorely disappointed.

That is because Mr Adam Pearson's office is not at Elland Road, the club's famous stadium, but over the road in an unimpressive two-storey annexe.

It is the sort of 1970s building that might house a newsagent, a chip shop or a launderette. As it is, Mr Pearson's office sits above a small travel and financial services agency. The fact that it is Leeds United's travel and financial agency hardly makes up for the lack of glamour, but it does suggest the club's business these days involves more than putting out a team every Saturday.

In previous days, the job of commercial director at a football club would have involved selling tickets, finding advertisers for the match programme "Mackenzie Smith's World of Leather, The Place For All Your Leather Needs" and making sure the club lottery was run properly.

Today, Mr Pearson's responsibilities extend not just to the merchandising, sponsorship, catering and hospitality businesses seen at most big clubs, but also to overseeing a travel agency, a financial services operation and an IT training business.

They are all part of what is English football's most diversified club, which turns over more than £50 million (€81 million) a year and is ranked among the largest in European football.

Given his expanded role, it is no surprise that the 35-year-old Yorkshireman has a background quite different from that of his predecessors. In the past, the commercial director of a club would often have been a former player, someone to impress the local bigwigs in the directors' bar after the game, but with enough commercial sense to keep the numbers ticking over.

Mr Pearson is a former sales manager at Marks & Spencer's London head office and a onetime commercial director at William Baird, the clothing manufacturer.

When he joined Leeds five years ago he was something of a rarity in football: a professional with business experience relevant to his job.

"Everyone knocks M&S but it gave me a very good training and a disciplined approach to business," he says of his time at the retailing group.

Unlike him, it seems, his predecessors and the people responsible for the club's four main businesses corporate hospitality, advertising, sponsorship and conferences and banqueting had no special expertise in their fields.

Little attention was paid to planning or long-term strategy. "Their approach was to do shortterm deals to fund the immediate player requirements. There was no brand building. They would sacrifice long-term planning for short-term gain just to get enough money in the pot to make the down-payment on a player.

"As long as you kept the overdraft under your agreement with the bank, everything was allowed."

Having spent his formative years in the structured and customer-oriented business culture of M&S, the young newcomer (he was 30 at the time) was taken aback at how Leeds was run.

It took more than a year to sort out the commercial department. At the behest of Leeds' new corporate owners, the Caspian group, a small London-based media company, the club was divided into different profit centres, and managers with experience in each area brought in to run them. Individual business plans were drawn up, objectives set and financial ratios and budgets introduced.

"It was just the basics but it was revolutionary at the time," he says. Like most revolutions, this one came at a cost for some people: 60 of the club's 120 employees were let go.

Once the restructuring was complete, Mr Pearson set about creating new revenue streams. Aside from growing its existing businesses, Leeds diversified into new, unrelated areas.

The idea behind the strategy was simple: to offer the local companies that used the club's corporate hospitality facilities, among them big businesses such as Yorkshire Water, Green Flag, Leeds & Holbeck, and Direct Line, a range of Leeds-branded services.

A travel company was bought to handle the travel needs of fans and corporate clients. "The business has just snowballed," says Mr Pearson. "We now have four of the biggest corporate travel accounts in the north of England."

And it is nicely profitable, with the corporate travel operation generating net margins of more than 10 per cent, compared with typical retail margins of less than 3 per cent.

After travel came financial services - the club has a joint venture with Allied Dunbar, which sells a range of financial products to retail and corporate customers - and then IT training.

Today, local companies send their staff to Elland Road for computer training. Why? Because Leeds United is an interesting place to hold what are essentially rather dull training courses.

"The employees enjoy coming down here because it's different. They get a ground tour, have their lunch here."

In every area, Mr Pearson is using the popularity of the Leeds name and the loyalty the club engenders to sell new businesses to existing customers. "They like buying into the brand because they feel they are supporting their local club as well."

All of this is a long way from the traditional idea of what constitutes a football club in the eyes of most supporters. At times, this can cause some confusion among fans.

"When you say you want to penetrate certain markets with your brand, football supporters look at you as if to say `What on earth are you talking about?' Possibly with some reason, because football is all about passion and emotion and their club. But from a plc and professional point of view, you do have to think of it as a brand, or you'll never put the right infrastructure and plans in place."

Thinking of Leeds as a brand, and a diversified one at that, has certainly helped the club's bottom line. In the past four years, Leeds' turnover has more than trebled to £37 million sterling and operating profits more than quadrupled to £6.4million. This year, the club is on course to produce record turnover of more than £50 million, with its commercial activities likely to generate around a third of that.

In 1995, when Mr Pearson joined the club, commercial sales totalled just £6 million.

These numbers may be tiny compared with those generated by his former employer. Most big M&S stores, on their own, turn over more in a year than Leeds does but Mr Pearson says the two types of business have one thing in common.

"Both are dependent on understanding what the customer wants. Obviously it's considerably easier here because we have a captive market coming every week that we can address if we have any problems. At somewhere like M&S, you can lose customers . . . and not get them back."

Yet, the nature of their customers is the biggest difference between M&S and Leeds. As Mr Pearson puts it: "At Leeds, the customers believe they own the brand. That does not happen anywhere else. M&S's customers don't think they own M&S. Here the customers actually think they should have a say in the running of the club."