Bolton Wanderers chairman Sharon Brittan said she never ever thought of making a managerial change at the club last year even during the difficult periods as she kept self-belief in the journey the club was going on.
Wanderers chairman Brittan appointed Ian Evatt as the club's new boss last summer after the departure of Keith Hill.
Evatt signed a three-year deal at the University of Bolton Stadium last year as Wanderers headed into their first campaign in the fourth tier of English football in some 30 years.
READ MORE: 'Football needs more like her' - Bolton Wanderers boss praises 'exceptional' chairman Sharon Brittan
But life in League Two did not get off to a great start, with Wanderers sitting 20th in the division at some points and calls from some sections of fans for Evatt to be relieved of his duties.
Brittan did not entertain those calls for one moment however and the January transfer window with the signings of the likes of Kieran Lee, MJ Williams, Declan John and Dapo Afolayan helped to transform Bolton's season which ended in automatic promotion to League One with a top three finish.
Wanderers chairman Brittan has explained why she stood firm in her support of Evatt, who she describes as an 'absolute delight' to work with and handed out a fresh deal to the former Barrow boss to remain at Bolton after winning promotion.
She explained that she had utmost faith in the journey the club was on with Evatt in the Wanderers dugout and explains the seismic shift and upheaval that a change of management can bring at a football club.
And Brittan believes her faith was rewarded when Wanderers win promotion last season.
Speaking in an interview with Cowgills Business Heroes, Brittan said: "There’s no other business that you’d run outside of football, because it’s the emotion of football, it’s a unique industry, and you do get very wealthy people who are prepared to commit the money, but I also don’t think some of these people realise - and I’ve realised it over the last two-and-a-half years - these are very stressful businesses to run.
"They’re high on emotion. We’ve seen it here, this time last year, we were 19th or 20th in League Two and the fans weren’t happy and rightly so. I had a very strong self belief in where we were going, so when people said to me ‘how did you do it?’
"But when you’ve got a strong self-belief in your journey, there is peripheral noise but I follow my self-belief, so never last year did I ever think of any changing management, did I ever think of any change in personnel.
"I was on a journey, I knew the journey we were on and I wasn’t deviating from that journey. We got to January, we had the transfer window in January and you saw the run we went on from January to- getting promotion, which was nothing short of a miracle.
“Bringing on Ian Evatt, he’s an absolute delight of a man to work with.
“Ian’s a fantastic guy, he’s a fantastic manager, he’s a fantastic person. He has this extraordinary ability to cope with the stress.
“A manager’s job is high stress, it really is high stress and another thing I do find in the industry which I do think is wrong, is that five games or five defeats and they’re changing the manager.
"That then brings not only the cost of that, it brings the whole rebuild, they take their team, you’ve got to bring in a new team, they want to bring in their own players, you’ve got the current players, so my mindset is you must give the manager the time to do his job and never was that better proven than last year when everyone was up in arms in November, we gave Ian the time, and we got promoted.”
