New boss of the Scarlets says she’s overcome past business failures

Martin Shipton

An unconventional businesswoman who could be the saviour of the Scarlets rugby region has spoken candidly of her early business failures in Wales and the lack of transparency about her company in the United States.

Kirsti Jane Baker, 36, originally from Pontypridd, now lives in Los Angeles with her husband Lloyd, who is also Welsh.

Her US-registered company House of Luxury has taken over the day-to-day management of the Scarlets, as well as paying its debts as they fall due. The plan is that the firm will take a 55% stake in the business.

Ms Baker has formed an unlikely partnership with David Moffett, the 78-year-old former no-nonsense chief executive of the WRU and Dan Biggar, the recently retired former Ospreys and Wales fly-half.

Existential crises

Her intervention comes at a time when regional rugby in Wales is going through one of its not infrequent existential crises, with many fearing that the Scarlets cannot survive as a stand-alone region.

Since Ms Baker’s involvement became public, Nation.Cymru has been made aware of areas of concern about her career in business.

We met her at Parc Y Scarlets in Llanelli and put the concerns to her. She responded to all our questions.

Before we discussed her detailed record, we asked her to explain generally the nature of her career.

She said: “I’ve only ever had one job, so to speak. I worked in a call centre for a really short period of time. I wasn’t very good at selling at the time, so that didn’t last very well. I’ve always been a bit of a rebel, I suppose you could in some way. So at the age of 19, I started my first business.

“Like any 19 to 21 year old, it doesn’t go great because you think you know the world. Part of the issue there was that we grew too quickly.

“After that, I spent a really long period just as self employed. I worked with a self-employed coach and consultant because although I wasn’t at first successful at selling, I actually discovered that I was good at selling when I did it my way.

“So through the people that I got to know through that first experience, I grew the network out and I was helping people and mentoring them. I knew that something I was good at was helping people find their own way of selling and build their own successful businesses. I spent a really long time coaching and consulting, and as part of that I was involved with a wide range of businesses from designer shoes right the way through to someone who wanted to start a cleaning company.”

For a short time she was in Wales, before moving to the Canary Islands for about six years and then to the United States.

We moved on to ask her about the specific companies she has been involved with.

House of Luxury

Her current company, House of Luxury, has its registered office in a town called Missoula in Montana. The nameboard outside the office doesn’t list House of Luxury, although it does list a tattooist.

We suggested to Ms Baker that Montana was known for the special secrecy of its company laws, where not much information is in the public domain.

She said the office was an accommodation address, and the company had no operational headquarters, adding: “There are other states in the US which are the same thing, and you could argue actually that every state in the US actually has the same privacy when it comes to LLCs [limited liability companies]. They don’t have the same system as the UK, and lots of other countries don’t either. We are catering for people that make it their mission to ensure that privacy is of the utmost of importance to them.”

Ms Baker said company accounts did not have to be put into the public domain, although they were audited and had to be submitted to the tax authorities. The Scarlets had been provided with the company’s accounts as part of the due diligence process.

Top 50 women-run companies

We asked how the company appeared on a list of top 50 women-run companies in the US that had to have shown a minimum annual revenue of $500,000 for five years when the firm was only registered in 2024. She said the company had been operating as a self-employed entity before being registered.

Asked what House of Luxury does, she said: “In a nutshell, we facilitate the selling and buying of luxury assets for ultra high net worth sovereign wealth funds, private wealth funds, family offices, anybody really who has the funds to do it.”

Asked what sort of assets were involved, she said: “We do everything from hotels to chateaus. We have golf courses. We have islands. We have jets. We have yachts. We have car collections. We do have some agents who do art. I don’t personally do it because it is an incredibly complicated space, and I don’t know enough about art to even consider stepping into it. So only the specialised sort of people who work with us would do that.”

Ms Baker also has a project called House of Motorsport Monaco, which has no web presence. She said: “House of Motorsport Monaco wasn’t actually ever an official thing. At the time we were originally going to launch it as a car brokerage. Actually, we still have the House of Motorsports branding, and we still have the House of Motorsports stuff that we do intend to do something with, but at the moment, we don’t have the capacity to do it.”

Director

In her early years, Ms Baker was a director of a number of companies, most of which never traded and were wound up: Extreme Cage Fighting, Pink Dolphin Companies and Rise Companies. One that did trade – Simply Charming Events, otherwise known as Wow Venue Styling, did trade briefly as a wedding venue decorator and let customers down.

She said: “We grew too quickly and took on too many orders. We didn’t have the capacity to fulfill them. I’m someone that comes from a bit of a background where admitting that you needed help made you look weak. So asking for help wasn’t easy, and I hadn’t gone through the many years of therapy that I’ve been through since then.”