Join the Hundred-Day Campaign and Make the Racing Industry Produce, Publish and Implement a Racing Recovery Plan to Retain Owners in the Sport

Please download the Blueprint
for a Racing Recovery Plan

One of the few plus-points of lockdown was that it gave a friend and owner, Ged Shields, and me time to research and write A Blueprint for Racehorse Ownership in the UK: Making retention and acquisition of owners the number 1 goal of a Racing Recovery Plan. It was launched in the Racing Post on 12th July and is now being driven forward by a campaign with a web site, video interviews, blogs and social media. Full details are on www.keepownersinracing.com and @keepownersinra1. This was our launch press release:

Please join the campaign and encourage
friends to do so as well

A hard rain is about to fall on our sport from the economic storm, triggered by the pandemic, and will continue for several years. It will rip through the weakest parts of the racing pyramid and sink without trace many trainers, breeders, owners, syndicators, betting shops and some racecourses. The pandemic is acting as a kind of “time machine” rushing racing’s outmoded business models to the end phase of a process that was always likely to happen.

Many staff will lose their jobs and equine welfare challenges increase as racehorses are retired, sold or “moved on”. No part of the industry will go untouched and the only question to be answered, in time, is the scale of contraction.

Why are we so depressingly confident in this assertion? Since the Resumption of Racing on 1st June we have spent five weeks researching the sport’s economic map and the financial interconnections of the supply chain from breeders to bookmakers. We’ve reflected on our own investment in the sport and the way we are currently being treated. We have been committed owners since 2004 with 132 winners so far and a current involvement in 39 horses covering everything from Flat to jumps, sole ownership to syndicates and foals to veterans. We use ten trainers across the country and ownership is by far the major drain on our discretionary expenditure. We will inevitably be part of the contraction that is coming but will do everything possible to mitigate its impact.

How far we personally retrench will be determined by how well racing’s leadership handles the next phase of the crisis and whether they are prepared to drive through a number of long overdue changes to the sport. We’ve highlighted our own Agenda for Action, as a blueprint for racing recovery, containing five strategies and twenty specific recommendations reflecting our data-driven analysis of the sport. It can be downloaded from the www.keepownersinracing.com home page.

Why did we produce it? Because of our deepening concern that the post-pandemic economic impact, racing’s tendency for stakeholders to fall out and fight each other rather than focus on the task ahead and the frustration of owners at how they are treated will lead to a significant contraction in ownership with a hugely damaging impact on the industry.

Encouragingly, we were impressed by the 100-day stakeholder truce and the collaborative approach adopted by the Resumption of Racing Work Group before normal hostilities returned. Huge changes to the pattern, fixture list, prize-money allocation and safety procedures were adopted. We applaud their efforts and feel it is vital that racing extends this endeavour to a new Recovery of Racing Group focused on the retention and acquisition of owners as the top priority. They should consider carefully our Blueprint’s headline messages:

1. Learn from the last financial crisis: without a Recovery of Racing Plan, contraction in ownership and horses in training will be far worse than after 2008 / 09 when there was a straight decline in numbers for seven years. We predict a loss of 20% of owners (2,244) and 15% of horses (3,531): an immediate financial impact of £124m.
2. The damage is done by the multiplier: for every £1 spent by owners, £7 is generated across the industry for bookmakers, breeders, sales houses, trainers and racecourses. This multiplier amplifies the £124m loss to racing to a significantly more damaging £868m.
3. Owners bankroll the sport: in 2019 / 20 they spent £527m on training fees and lost a collective £428m. This excludes the £145m spent (and mostly lost) on bloodstock (excluding Horses in Training sales). For every pound spent on training fees the median return was 8p on the Flat and 6p for National Hunt. It will be even worse in 2020 as prize-money declines further. This is unsustainable and increasingly drives owners out of the sport.
4. The trend is not racing’s friend: racing faces strong headwinds this decade due to economic contraction, owner demographics and the need to rebuild personal and company balance sheets. The average age of owners is over 60 with substantial numbers over 70. Most are extremely concerned about Covid-19 and wary of going racing. This inhibits further any desire to continue investing in racehorses.
5. Be radical in response: racing needs a recovery plan that retains and attracts owners as the prime goal for the next five years. There is no time to lose. Racing can address this in one of two ways. Option one is to deny the scale of the challenge, massively underestimate its impact, muddle through with divided leadership, claim that it is already doing things and avoid making difficult decisions, keeping fingers crossed and hoping the “old normal” returns soon. It won’t. Option two is to embrace radical change, form a coalition of all the stakeholders and drive forward wide-ranging responses that create the “next normal”. We urge British Racing to adopt option two. It is not short of the talent to do this, but they tend to operate in isolation and seem focused on narrow stakeholder interests that are often in competition with the others.

Stakeholders need to come together, put their disputed issues on the table and find sufficient common ground to implement the necessary initiatives, such as those outlined in this Blueprint. We have made our “call to arms” and now challenge the industry to develop and communicate a Recovery of Racing Plan within the next 100 days.

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.

A Major Milestone for The Owner’s Opinion – This is Our 150th Edition

Doesn’t time fly! We set up Owners for Owners in the summer of 2012 with the intention of helping owners come together to share the costs, risks and pleasures of racehorse ownership. As well as setting up the web site, we also launched our fortnightly blog, The Owner’s Opinion. With dedication, fortitude and on occasions liberal supply of strong red wine, we’ve managed not to miss an issue and built up a worldwide readership. On occasions the blog hits have been over 30,000, so hopefully those of you who read it find that we are both topical and sufficiently interesting to secure your continued readership.

It’s also incredible to reflect that since 2012 we have personally been involved in buying well over 50 horses and indeed at the moment are managing ownership of 23 horses at all ages from foals to 7-year-olds, in sole ownership, joint ownerships, partnerships, syndicates and a racing club and there aren’t many weeks when we’re not racing. With the exception of trainers we probably have as good an insight into racecourses and the owner experience as anyone, which is why we have participated in a number of working parties over the years, not least the BHA’s Strategy for Growth Pillar on Ownership and Bloodstock.

It is also no surprise that we’ve enjoyed both the highs and the inevitable lows of ownership. I’ll never forget the thrill of watching Lord Ben Stack lead the field of the Dante into the home straight, before sadly succumbing to colic a couple of years later – a gorgeous horse and much missed. On New Year’s Day this year, it was a similar thrill to see Acey Milan galloping the field into submission in the Listed 4yo Bumper at Cheltenham, and the dream is very much alive with this youngster. And also I’ll never forget the day at York Races when Buckle Street, ridden by the irrepressible Belinda Keighley, won the Macmillan Charity Race – absolutely no prize-money was gained by this win but it was a magnificent achievement, with Belinda raising an enormous amount of money for charity. The champagne celebrations in the paddock straight afterwards and throughout the evening were heroic. Brilliant days like these are what sustain us.

While trying to convey in the blog the mix of pleasures and frustrations that come from ownership, we’ve also had a campaigning edge throughout the 150 issues. The executive teams of a number of racecourses, particularly Newbury, Cheltenham before its improvements and some of the Arc tracks, became well aware of our lobbying for dramatic improvements in the owner experience. At heart, Owners for Owners is a very democratic, grass-roots body and we’ve long felt that the privileged top end of racing receives far too much money and attention, so we’ve lobbied hard for more prize-money and better facilities on the lesser days of racing. Some of our fellow syndicate organisers have also received a number of blasts as we’ve pushed hard for proper transparency and standards in syndication, which have now been adopted. Most of our campaigning has been well received, although we’ve doubtless made an enemy or two along the way – so be it. As a great friend of mine always says, “smooth diamonds don’t cut glass”.

And I’m sure the campaigning will continue. Indeed in the last blog I started to describe the new ownership strategy for British Racing and indicated that I was going to apply pressure for far more publicity about the strategy, while ensuring that the grass-roots owners had the right level of involvement in framing it particularly through the Racehorse Syndicates Association. I duly took this up with all the top executives in the industry and have received reassurances from them that this will now happen. Rest assured that The Owner’s Opinion will be holding their feet to the fire through late Summer and Autumn as this strategy is duly developed and published ….. Something tells me however that this won’t necessarily be a smooth journey. Don’t worry, I promise to keep you all posted.

On to the next 150!

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.

Will the New PASS System Pass the Tests of Ease of Access and Enhancing the Owner Experience?

Regular readers of the blog will know that I have been campaigning over a number of years for radical improvement of the owner experience in terms of the way in which owners collect complimentary badges and enter the racecourse. At times I have been very critical of the old-fashioned way in which Owners & Trainers desks sometimes operate (no computers, when they do have computers there’s no internet access, if they do have access there’s no broadband, loads of paperwork and print-outs on which they can never find your name, long queues of owners irritated by endless delays, further irritation by people who are clearly trying to blag their way into the racecourse with no entitlement to badges, almost accusatory interrogation about who you are and proving your identity, etc.), while other elements of my campaign have argued for the adoption of customer relationship management (CRM) approaches where through technology and smart cards, different types of owner receive different types of benefits based on their contribution to racing through ownership. Basically the more you spend on owning racehorses, the better the benefits.

My ideal would be that everyone in the UK who is an owner in a racehorse (no matter what size the share) would have a smart ID badge that automatically contains information about their ownership and entitlement to badges and benefits. The more shares / horses you own, the better the quality of lounges and hospitality arrangements you can access. This would parallel the decades-old airline model of first-class and business-class lounges. Apparently in Australia this type of arrangement is already operative, with the benefits based around tiers of points. Although I have no first-hand experience of the scheme, it has apparently proved very motivating with owners investing in more shares in horses to lift themselves into the next tier of enhanced owner facilities. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be through a badge – it could just as easily be via a smart phone. Alas, this ideal still seems to be an awfully long way off for British, and indeed European, racing.

But some encouraging changes are under way, and a fair bit of innovation is coming into racing over the next twelve months which ought to enhance the owner experience. Let’s hope that all of this will be successful, particularly the way in which it is implemented. Again, regular blog readers will know how critical I was of Weatherbys Bank when they “upgraded” online banking. They are still sorting out that disaster.

In the UK, the Privilege Access Swipe System (PASS) card was introduced over 20 years ago by racecourses to manage exclusive complimentary access for owners to courses. From 1st November this Autumn, new gold PASS cards have been provided by the Racecourse Association (RCA), with some ambitious goals. They have been designed “to ensure quick and easy access to racecourses”; to “revolutionise your pre-arrival and entry experience”, giving you “the chance to personalise your raceday experience from start to finish”, and “this modern and mobile system allows better communication between you and racecourses, ensuring a personal touch to the raceday experience”.

The new PASS card is to be used whenever a registered owner has a runner, and also to gain entry via the Racecourse Badge Scheme for Owners (RBSO), which allows ROA members who are registered owners to gain complimentary access to over 1,300 race fixtures per year as long as they have 50% of a horse (or shares equivalent to that). Details are on www.rcapass.com and there is also an online concierge system to check allocation of tickets, pre-assign tickets to guests and discover information about special arrangements.

All of this sounds absolutely fantastic, as long as it works in practice for all the different types of owner, and particularly those in partnerships and syndicates. The major challenge for those who organise such shared ownership arrangements, and particularly for National Hunt where there are still 24-hour declarations, is that there is not a lot of time to liaise with all the owners and receive their instructions in terms of who will be attending and their requirements for additional badges for any guests, as well as confirming eligibility for lunches. Under the old system, which is now being replaced, the reliance was on telephone calls, faxes or emails to courses. Sometimes, with some courses, this worked well, but with others it didn’t. Whenever I have gone racing I have always taken a printed copy of the correspondence with me to sort out the errors and mistakes, and prove that we had given the course clear instructions. That shows how often the system broke down.

I had hoped to report by now on how well the new PASS system is working. I have tried to use it on two trips to the track, but on the first occasion they wanted to stay with the old system and on the second “the system was down” and computer said no. Not the most encouraging start! On the implementation timescale that the RCA has mapped out, they are convinced that the system should be “firmly established” from 1st January. We will have to wait and see. If any of you experience any problems at all with the new system, please let me know and I will do an update on how the new system is working in the New Year. For the sake of racing, I do hope that the RCA learnt from the Weatherbys debacle, and that the new system has been properly trialled and guaranteed to work really effectively. All crossed!

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.

Rapidly On From Epsom to Royal Ascot – and Will We Soon See Luxury Hotels on Racecourses?

Once again going into Epsom there was a feeling that there might not be any truly outstanding horses running, but I think that view has changed following a number of superb performances, not least from Minding, Postponed and then a little bit behind them, Harzand.

A number of us were lucky enough to have a visit to Coolmore Stallions in Ireland recently, with a couple of our owners brave enough to pat the mighty Galileo. His daughter, Minding, showed great bravery and versatility, I thought, to win the Oaks having been brought almost to a standstill at the top of the straight. Aidan O’Brien was particularly effusive afterwards, saying: “Speed, class, stamina, a great mind. Real heart, courage and guts had to come into it, but she had it in abundance, like all the Galileos.” At least I’ve stood next to the great Galileo, even if I’ll never afford to buy one of his offspring. This was a particularly notable performance, as she had three demanding races in five weeks, winning the English 1,000 Guineas, coming 2nd in the Irish equivalent and then the Oaks. She looks an outstanding filly and it will be interesting to see if they bring her back in trip or keep her at 1m 4f. I could see her doing well in the Autumn, in the Arc.

Postponed has long been a favourite of mine, and he just seems to be a horse who is getting better with age. By the magnificent stallion Dubawi, he was outstanding in the Coronation Cup and presumably will now be targeted at the King George. He is currently the Arc favourite. Sea The Stars has rapidly established himself as a top stallion, and his son Harzand won the most valuable race ever staged in the UK in this year’s Derby. Amazingly it was the first win in the race for Dermot Weld, who has been a hero of mine for decades. One wonders now whether his owner, the Aga Khan, will consider having horses again in the UK. It just shows again that once a late-maturing colt really starts improving, he can take huge strides forward.

By the time this blog comes out, we will be a couple of days into Royal Ascot. Surprisingly, rather than commenting on the racing, my eyes were drawn to an article in The Times on Monday entitled “Ascot considers betting on a hotel to attract year-round big spenders”. A friend of mine, particularly when he has had a few drinks, often quotes Peter Kay from Phoenix Nights: “Garlic bread, it’s the future, I’ve tasted it!” That had me thinking that in some ways racecourses in the UK could easily redefine themselves and their assets by branching out into other related sports and leisure activities. It is easy to think that racecourses don’t really change that much, but if you take an historical perspective, the evolution has been enormous. As indeed has been their demise. I looked up the number of racecourses that have actually closed, and was staggered to learn that 186 have gone through the 19th and 20th centuries, many as a result of housing and property booms. You only have to think of Bromford Bridge in Birmingham, Alexandra Park in London, Castle Irwell in Salford, Hurst Park in Surrey and Gatwick.

Guy Henderson, the Chief Executive of Ascot, is convinced that the track is such a magnificent site that a hotel could be a real game-changer, despite the considerable capital investment. He indicated that they may look for a partner to explore the options for the site. As it is, Ascot is a highly profitable course and their annual revenues were up 10% to £75m in 2015, with profits rising by nearly 11% to £18.7m. It is easy to see top-end racecourses going down the housing and hotel route with Newbury’s ongoing redevelopment an obvious example.

All that I am hoping is that the financial re-engineering and redefinition of racecourses such as this results in substantial additional funding for owners’ and trainers’ facilities. There is no reason why the two cannot co-exist, as Ayr demonstrates so well throughout the season with the marvellous lunches provided in the Western Hotel. So maybe this is an emerging element of the future of racing. Maybe not as popular as garlic bread, but significantly more sophisticated.

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.

Is York Now the Best Racecourse in the Country? It is Certainly My Favourite.

The recent Ebor festival was an outstanding success, although only a few favourites came in, and even then I studiously managed to avoid backing them. So if I was talking through my pocket I would definitely be critical. But I’m exactly the opposite as far as the Knavesmire is concerned. It really is a super track.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m more than prepared to criticise racecourses for their indifferent service and poor facilities – not just for owners but for the general racegoer as well. York, however, seems to get all the basics right, and over the last few years has made significant multi-million pound investments in facilities such as the new pre-parade ring, Champagne bars, restaurants etc. There are always lots of areas to relax, sit down, raise a few glasses of the best value Champagne on race tracks in the country, the walkways actually allow you to get around easily and all the staff are unfailingly polite and appear to be extremely well trained. Even the excellently produced and detailed racecards are free.

This year’s festival also will have pleased owners, with every race worth more than £50,000 in prize-money, and there have been significant boosts for the hugely competitive handicaps as well as the pattern races. Indeed the level of competition is such that to win at York now you need to have a horse who if not already 100+ on official ratings soon will be, after winning any of the races there.

Like all business operations, it is the quality of leadership that really counts, and Lord Grimthorpe and his team, with the hugely talented William Darby, have to be commended for what they have achieved. Indeed I have heard that the members of the board only receive payments to cover expenses, so for many of the top team it is clearly a labour of love, with all profits and surpluses ploughed back into the course in prize-money. This really does set the benchmark in quality, commitment and performance that all racecourses need to strive for.

In terms of the racing itself this year, this brought quite a bit of controversy, most of it on Day 1. Arabian Queen, in the Juddmonte International, turned over the hot Derby-winning favourite Golden Horn. It is just a pity that the winning trainer, David Elsworth, then made a complete fool of himself, throwing a major strop about not being invited to lunch and apparently feeling that his filly had been unfairly criticised. In the Great Voltigeur, Pat Cosgrave got into a barging match on Storm The Stars but under current British rules kept the race. It is now pretty clear that unless there is only a neck or a head difference in a result, the chances are that interference won’t lead to a result being overturned. Throughout the meeting a few jockeys picked up bans for over-use of the whip, and with the level of prize-money on offer it is clearly the case that some jockeys are still prepared to ignore the rules. There should be stiffer penalties to curtail this behaviour.

The two highlights for me, though, were undoubtedly the magnificent successes for “ordinary owners and ordinary trainers”. Mecca’s Angel’s win in the Nunthorpe was the first Group 1 for both jockey Paul Mulrennan and trainer Michael Dods. On the right ground she is a really game filly and was very well bought for 16,000 gns. The Prix de l’Abbaye at Longchamps is an obvious next target for her. Then in the Ebor the win by Litigant for Joe Tuite and A.A. Byrne was a mightily impressive performance bearing in mind that the horse had been off the track since April 2014. Again, cheaply bought at £18,500. The owner currently has seven horses in training, and the other six haven’t managed to win £10,000 in total between them this year. Such are the highs and lows of ownership. I used to live only a couple of miles away from Tuite’s yard, in Great Shefford near Lambourn, and doubtless if I was still based there would have heard some whispers beforehand. Sadly, all my bets went down, and indeed the final day of the meeting was just about a complete graveyard for punters. The Placepot paying £4,882 to a £1 stake says everything about the day!

Great to see the ordinary owner do well. That was in marked contrast to the results for some of the top trainers, most noticeably William Haggas, all of whose winners were owned by royalty and sheikhs. Such is the value of mega-wealthy patronage in the top yards at Headquarters.

Already looking forward to York next year, and indeed have already booked accommodation. See you there!

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.

How Many “Owners” in Owners & Trainers Bars and in the Paddock are Genuine Owners?

I’ve been going to a large number of race meetings over the autumn, following our horses, and as many of you will know I’m quite a critic of the owners’ badge allocation system and its archaic administrative procedures. Ordering and then collecting them is needlessly time-consuming, and often a source of tension as genuine owners often have to convince the O&T desk that they are entitled to them. Definitely a system that needs to be brought into this century, never mind this decade. Smart ID systems, linked to owner IDs, would solve all of it, and also provide really valuable information to racecourses in line with modern customer relationship management practice. Doubtless there would be some technical issues, but as so many other leisure sectors have dealt with them, I can’t believe that there isn’t a perfect system out there, waiting for the racing industry to get up to date and adopt it.

However, in this blog I wanted to switch it round, because I do have a lot of sympathy with racecourses over the widespread abuse of owners’ badges. In effect there is an active black market in badges with lots of people getting access to them, particularly via trainers, jockeys, racecourse officials, syndicate managers etc. This fuels the generally suspicious attitude that prevails at O&T desks. Every person who gets in on a badge that they are not genuinely entitled to, is clearly lost revenue for the racecourse, and it is probably not an insignificant amount of money. Let’s say that 100 people per meeting get in for nothing, then that could easily be £3,000 lost income. Equally that is money that could be spent in the Owners & Trainers facility on better standards of refreshment, food, service etc. as well as improving the overall atmosphere.

As people who know me can testify, I’m very much behind the democratisation of racing and I’d like to see more people from non-traditional areas becoming active owners and investing in our sport. I don’t want to sound snobbish about this, but often I find myself in an Owners & Trainers entrance queue behind “no-good boyos” who are clearly picking up or cadging owners’ badges so that they can go on the lash on the racecourse and particularly in the O&T bar. Similarly at a number of tracks there are groups of people who seem to live there permanently, and yet never go out to see horses. I just don’t believe these people are involved in ownership, but are just exploiting the system and in effect being subsidised to attend privileged facilities by genuine owners.

Another aspect of this is the various hangers-on in the pre-parade and parade ring, who often attach themselves to owners simply because they have some relatively distant contact with a trainer or another horse in the yard. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve no problems whatsoever with owners inviting friends along into the paddock, but it is when you find yourself with individuals with whom there are no real links or ties or friendship at all – they have just become non-paying, limpet owners freeloading on a badge system that is not fit for purpose.

What, if anything, should be done about it? The recommended starting point is clearly tightening up the whole process in a way that genuinely allocates badges in a generous way to owners who are investing in the sport, while making it far more difficult for the free-loaders. More guidelines from the Racecourse Association and National Trainers’ Federation would help. There should be a policy actively to discourage the doling out of freebie badges just because many individuals are brazen enough to ask for them. A half-way house might be to allocate a small number of badges to trainers so that they both manage and police the allocation in a way that is deemed to be equitable to their network of contacts and owners. Another and very innovative suggestion (which I know is being examined) is to set up a system for people to become “owners for the day” where they attend the racecourse as owners when a horse’s genuine owners are unable to attend, thereby experiencing at first hand the pleasures of being a racehorse owner. But they would pay for that privilege.

I don’t have any statistics on the scale of the problem, and hope I don’t sound too curmudgeonly, but I think the industry ought to be actively discouraging the freeloading, while equally actively encouraging investment in owning horses.

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.

First Class or Third Class: The Beastly Business of Bargaining for Badges

Very occasionally in my management consultancy career I enjoyed entering an aircraft and turning left to fly first class. Bearing in mind that I was a procurement specialist, it would hardly have been an impressive action on the part of the client to spend all that money on me. However, when I did travel like that, I really enjoyed it, and it was always on the Heathrow to JFK run. Currently a first-class flight with British Airways and onward helicopter into Manhattan is just a whisker under £5,000. You book your ticket and check in online; there is a limo to the airport; you are fast-tracked through security; you can relax with a glass or three of Krug before being feted by top-class cabin staff while enjoying an excellent gourmet dinner; before a relaxing sleep in a luxury fold-down seat.

You’re probably wondering why I’m wittering on about such luxuries. It is because, if you take the average price of the average racehorse and its average training fees over its average career, and total it all up before dividing it by the number of races the horse runs, you’ll find that it is between £4,000 and £5,000. If you take into account the purchase price of the bloodstock and write that off completely, it would take the average racecourse appearance cost up to nearer £7,000.

So next time you go racing as an owner, you may (but then again, may not) want to consider the fact that your investment for that afternoon is somewhere between £4,000 and £7,000. You may also want to reflect upon whether you are being treated in the same way as someone with a first-class ticket on British Airways.

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between being a purchaser of racehorses and a purchaser of other luxury goods and services. In one, we have traditionally been treated as relatively unimportant, whereas in the other we are the number one customer.

Let’s just examine one aspect in more detail – badge allocation and collection. In our house, my wife Jack and I share the same office to do all the admin and communications for Owners for Owners. One of the biggest sources of tension is dealing with racecourses and persuading them to allocate as many badges as we need for our owners. Some courses are miserly, while others are generous; some are highly inefficient, requiring lots of emails and phone calls, while others appear far more switched-on and customer orientated; some hide behind health & safety rules (“we can’t have too many owners in the paddock”), while others will do everything they can to accommodate; some of the staff on O&T desks haven’t a clue, whereas others are highly professional “owner ambassadors”; the one common denominator is that you will invariably have to join a shuffling queue and be given the once-over by someone who suspects you are trying to blag your way in for nothing. Allocations can vary between 6, 8, 10, 12 or more. Sometimes there is a free hot meal and sometimes only a bun and cup of tea. Some accept ROA swipe cards, some don’t. Hardly ever do you see a computer. Usually there is just a long list of names by horse and race, and someone has to track down manually who you are.

I don’t think airlines selling first-class tickets would keep many customers paying £4-5,000 a time for the privilege of being treated so shabbily and inefficiently. Surely it’s time to catch up with modern customer relationship management and jump several decades at a single go, by introducing smart technology, owner recognition systems, privilege cards, professionally trained customer liaison staff and also some old-fashioned courtesy towards racing’s number one customer, i.e. the owner. Many decades ago I worked with British Airways on their behavioural training programme, “Putting People First”. It’s about time racing and racecourses did the same: “Putting Owners First”, and genuinely meaning it.

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.