All Change with the Final Owners’ Opinion Blog – But don’t worry, we’ll be continuing the campaigns under the Keep Owners in Racing banner from 1st January

When we set up Owners for Owners back in 2012 as a not-for-profit organisation, our goal was to encourage owners to get together to share the costs, risks and pleasures of owning racehorses. We’ve had a lot of success, not just with the racehorses on the track but also with the super friendships across the network of owners we have built up. Long may that continue! We’re currently working on a complete rebuilding of the web site, www.ownersforowners.co.uk, which we hope will be live by 1st January. The current web site will then be archived, so if you would like to download any materials from the site, please do so during December.

However, our campaigns to secure a better deal for owners will most definitely continue. We’ll be using the www.keepownersinracing.com web site for this, and as you may already have seen, we’ve been creating lots of reports, blogs and films to promote the cause. Here are two of the latest KOIR blogs.

Get Counting – Time to Register Every Owner and Properly Understand the Ownership Base

An entertaining article by Peter Scargill from the virtual Racing Post Arms suggested a tiered system of ownership for segmenting sole owners from syndicate members on the racecourse. This is a sensible suggestion but it needs to be underpinned by data otherwise it could have a negative impact on the overall level of ownership.

Surely nobody would argue that a syndicate member with 5% of one horse should enjoy the same on course privileges as a sole owner. But what about the syndicate member who owns 10% of ten horses or an individual who owns a leg in four horses?

The sensible way forward is for all the % shares of each owner to be aggregated and for the resultant data to drive a multi-tiered/ segmented ownership hierarchy. For example , Platinum for those owners with the % equivalent of five horses or more, Gold for those with 100% or more, Silver for those with 50% or more and Bronze for the rest. Racecourses could determine which level of ownership status would gain access to Owners & Trainers facilities on certain days. For instance, with an ordinary midweek meeting the racecourse might grant access to all ownership levels but a big Saturday meeting might allow just Platinum and Gold. Indeed, such status levels could increase ownership by encouraging owners to buy extra shares so they could get to the next level.

But there is a huge problem.

Racing cannot set sensible thresholds for ownership status because it doesn’t currently know what thousands of its owners actually own. There are around 35,000 owners in the UK but only 14,000 are registered and even being registered only provides a partial picture of what an owner actually contributes to the sport. I’m involved in 19 horses but am the registered owner of just one of them. The sport doesn’t know what I own in total. I’ve been a member of the ROA for five years but they haven’t a clue either. I know scores of other owners who are investing £50k+ a year in the sport yet don’t appear on it’s radar. So taking the simplistic but ultimately flawed option of tiering ownership on a sole owners v the rest approach could cause British Racing to lose large numbers of owners who invest substantially in the sport.

The answer is simple. Every owner and every share they own, no matter how small, MUST be registered. This would reassure owners that they actually own what they think they own and would enable the sport to finally understand its ownership base. Then, and only then, could it introduce a tiered ownership approach safe in the knowledge that it understands the value of every individual owner. The inevitable complaints about extra bureaucracy and administration should be ignored because the prize for the sport is so much greater.

Ownership Strategy: What Do You Think Of It So Far? – Rubbish

In the last couple of weeks I’ve spoken to almost as many journalists as I’ve had bottles of champagne to celebrate winners – and I’ve had a few! A number of articles have come out already, in the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and the Racing Post. The theme is the Ownership Strategy, or rather, its absence, despite the sudden release of almost 200 pages by the ROA on 3rd November – not a bad day to bury voluminous information, as it was the US Presidential election and two days before lockdown.

Incredibly, the biggest document, an 166-page slide pack, was produced in 2017, so why on earth it has not been publicly released before is beyond me. The Horsemen’s Group are passionate about transparency but not, apparently, when it comes to their own discussions and decision-making. This document passes the first part of my “half-life test” for British Racing decision-making, i.e. three years to produce a report, followed by three years to bury it. I could not help but quote Eric Morecambe! They are beautiful documents from a design standpoint but “rubbish” from a strategic perspective. Here’s why:

1. Is there a strategy? The greatest academic in strategy in the world is Professor Richard Rummelt of the University of Southern California. He describes most strategies as “garbage”, long “laundry lists”, “statements of desire” that avoid dealing with the small number of difficult, complex, critical issues; peppered with a huge number of “f” words – “fluff” and “flannel”. All the ROA documentation confirms is that they have not produced a strategy, despite being paid £1.2m to do so.
2. Is it an Industry-wide Ownership Strategy? No. Somewhere along the line from 2017 it has morphed into what, in effect, is an ROA membership drive. I have no problems with the ROA trying to attract more members, but they were given the task of finding out ways of retaining and attracting owners to the sport, which is not the same thing.
3. Is it capable of being implemented? As there is absolutely no plan of campaign, no road map, no targets or deliverables, no resource plan or funding model, you quickly conclude that the answer is “no”.
4. Has the so-called “strategy” been scrutinised? There’s no evidence to say that it has. While doubtless a number of individuals are aware of these documents, there has been no challenge process and therefore the ROA has not been held to account. Indeed, and going somewhat further, if you asked the board members of the ROA under oath about their sight and scrutiny of these documents, I believe that some would confirm that they weren’t aware of them until 3rd November. A board is there to hold the chairman and chief executive officer to account, and there seems to have been a serious breach of governance here.
5. Is the industry engaged? No. Indeed, if you ask anyone, in any position (outside the ROA, of course) in British Racing whether they understand or are committed to the ROA’s ownership strategy, they will come out with an identical response: “What is it? I haven’t seen it.” In a sport as territorial as racing, it takes some doing to produce such unity.
6. Has racing and the Levy Board received good value for money? It most definitely hasn’t. This is one of the most worrying features of the investment made, and one that the Keep Owners in Racing team intend to raise with the chair of the BHA, Annamarie Phelps, later in the week. If it’s not a scandal, it’s certainly a fiasco. We will also be pressing for a change of leadership of the ROA.

Back to Eric Morecambe. Did you know that his real name was Eric Bartholomew? Although he was born in Morecambe. That’s you now primed for quiz night for whenever we’re allowed back into pubs again. Do stay safe and well throughout the next lockdown period.

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.

Do You See the Racing and Ownership Cup as Half Full or Half Empty Post-Lockdown? More Storm Clouds are Building and we Desperately Need a Racing Recovery Plan

Did Royal Ascot work for you? I doubt if there’s ever been a stranger race meeting there since 1711, but full marks to everyone involved in staging the meeting behind closed doors, and there were certainly lots of innovations to keep everyone engaged and (relatively) amused. Of course, there was no Queen, no royal procession, no fancy hats or frocks (so no dress codes), no overseas jockeys, no owners and no bookmakers. There were a few trainers present, who privately were probably thinking that this was ideal racing with no pesky owners to cause problems and a completely uninterrupted focus on their steeds. They may well have bemoaned the slashing of prize-money that was halved to a total of £3.7m, spread over 36 races and the five days of the meeting, but it’s definitely worth emphasising that this huge reduction in pots had zero impact on the quality of horses that raced across Ascot Heath, nor on the total number of entries or runners. It was very much “business as usual” – if you can say that about the bizarre world of lockdown racing.

The TV channels tried ever so hard to make the meeting engaging for owners and racing fans at home, as did Ascot itself. There were virtual racecards, 360 degree parade-ring cameras, Zoom interviews with owners at home, racing tips aplenty, recipes and cocktail recommendations for drinks such as Absolut Passion, colouring pages (???) and even virtual singing around the bandstand. It was encouraging that ITV was rewarded with its highest viewing figures for terrestrial TV since 2012, with an average for its 20 hours of broadcasting of 1.2 million viewers, and they had even more than that to watch Stradivarius romp home in the Gold Cup. What a fabulous horse he is – and I’m hoping that one day Scented Lily, the broodmare we own with friends and who is currently in foal to Getaway, will have a date with this superstar.

Unfortunately though, half-way through the month, normal hostilities were resumed again between the Horsemen’s Group and the Racecourse Association over the vexed subject of prize-money – or rather, the lack of executive contribution by some racecourses towards prize-money since racing resumed on 1st June. The collaborative spirit of the Resumption of Racing Group that so impressed us all will struggle to survive threats of legal action and accusations of anti-competitive collusion by horsemen against the tracks. This breakdown in working relations is one of the reasons that I fear storm clouds are building, as it will be absolutely vital that from today onwards – National Hunt has finally resumed – the Resumption of Racing Group is transformed into a Recovery of Racing Group to address the inevitable contraction of ownership that is coming, and the huge knock-on effect of that across the whole industry.

Why is my cup half-empty? Back in 2016 the BHA and ROA commissioned an excellent National Racehorse Owners Survey from a specialist sports consultancy, Two Circles. I reported on their findings in this blog on 15th August and 1st September that year. Their analysis and findings were well presented, and although they didn’t frame them in the way that I am about to do, I certainly agreed with their conclusions.

At university, where I studied social psychology, I was impressed by the concept of “expectation theory” to explain the motivation of individuals. Sociologists and psychologists never make anything simple, of course, but the basic concept was that each individual has a complex set of their own expectations, and whether these are or are not met directly influences their motivation to do something. It is also a two-factor theory, which means that the factors that prompt you to do something are not necessarily the same as those that might dissuade you. Anyway, I applied that approach to ownership and, as you can see in the diagram, I concluded that the factors that bring owners into the sport are to do with the emotional return that they receive on their ownership (excitement, glamour, status, close contact with their beautiful horse etc.), whereas those that drive them out are directly connected with poor financial return (bad prize-money, high costs, irritating fees and charges etc.) I was hoping that after 2016, racing’s leadership would develop a whole set of strategies to boost owner acquisition (bringing new owners and their money into the sport), together with another set to foster owner retention (reducing the churn rate of owners). I was tolerant about the relative lack of action, and then encouraged again in 2018 when the ROA announced that they were leading the development and implementation of a new Ownership Strategy. After three years without sight of it, my tolerance is just about exhausted. Does anyone know where it is, what it says, what it is designed to achieve and how it will be implemented?

If you look over your shoulder, though, all you can see o4n the ownership front is storm clouds. When racing resumed on 1st June, it was clumsily stated that owners would not be able to go racing as they were not deemed to be “essential”. That was terribly received. Owners are funding the sport and, using my two-factor model, the emotional return has been massively reduced (as until recently they could neither see their horses in the stables nor go racing) while the financial return has similarly contracted (with reduced prize-money, not least because of the reluctance of racecourses to make their executive contribution). Owner frustration has certainly increased, and this has been acknowledged by the BHA, ROA and RCA. Indeed, as I write this blog I’ve just seen a letter from the chief executive of the ROA, Charlie Liverton, explaining that “Owners contribute so much to the sport and it has been frustrating not to be on the track to see their horses run. Their patience and loyalty have been very much appreciated during this challenging period.” Much appreciated, Mr. Liverton, and I look forward to hearing what racing is now going to do, going forward, to persuade me and co-owners to expand our involvement in the sport, or as a minimum, maintain it at current levels.

Without that, racing is heading for deep trouble. In the period after the last financial crisis of 2008/09, owners and horses in training declined in a straight line for seven years. Is there any reason why this won’t happen again? Actually, and filling the cup to the brim, I believe that a Recovery of Racing Group could implement a set of initiatives to have a hugely beneficial impact on racing and ownership, and significantly mitigate this contraction. Such is the level of enthusiasm for this approach that I’ve persuaded a friend and fellow owner, Ged Shields, to work with me on the development of a blueprint for a recovery programme. We intend to release it after the Derby, and it will be detailed in the next blog.

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 Whinge on Racecourse Access Roads, Car Parks and Car Park Attendants – The Power of the First Impression

Over the years since I started The Owner’s Opinion blog, the pendulum has swung between quite robust, strategic articles and highly practical and more tactical offerings. Today’s blog is firmly in the latter category.

Psychologists know that the power of the first and last impressions have significantly higher impact than what goes on between them. I’m sure that this applies equally to racecourses, and we all know that there are a number of racecourses in the country that create a magnificent first impression but, alas, there are others that fail miserably. I don’t particularly like to “name and shame”, so I’ll sidestep that, but racecourses I am particularly impressed by include Newbury, the Rowley Mile course at Newmarket and my favourite track in the country, York, as far as large tracks are concerned, whereas unfortunately most of the smaller tracks are somewhat challenged, although that is not an excuse for some of the unimpressive incidents that are all too frequent. I’m not going to mention any specific courses, but you may be able to recognise some of them. Here is my whinge.

• Lack of signage: the locals may know the area but visiting owners often do not. Navigating your way through towns is never easy, and with many racecourses located out in the countryside it is often difficult to work out the correct way to approach them. When you eventually locate them, often the signage for Owners & Trainers car parks are too small and badly positioned.
• Racecourse access road: why are so many too narrow, potholed and with rough, inadequate surfacing? That isn’t just the minor tracks – it is the case at some of the biggest courses in the country. It is sometimes unclear whether they are two-lane roads, so it is left to drivers to decide. Sometimes you find that two-lane roads become one-way only at various times, though nothing explains what triggers that.
• Entrance to the car park: how many times have you encountered the custodian of the car park glaring at you for some unknown and unintended breach of procedure? While a few breezily wave you through on display of your O&T car park badge or ROA PASS card, others seem determined to block the entrance and keep you out, regardless of your entitlement to be there. It is not much of a first impression if the verbals / non-verbals are “You can’t come in”, or “You can’t park here”, or “You can come in, but can only park in that big puddle over there”, or, of course, “Anywhere you like, in the mud”.
• The car park surface: if I was going for a normal distribution of surfacing, I would say that 20% is lamentably bad; 20% a combination of grass, gravel and mud; 20% Ok apart from when it’s raining (which is hardly uncommon in this country, particularly this winter); 20% quite acceptable and you can park on it and walk over it without getting covered in mud; and 20% superb, as it is hard standing and properly laid out.
• Signage to Owners & Trainers: sometimes good but often non-existent. My worst experience was going to a minor NH course when I followed the signs to the racecourse car park, only to be told that I’d come to the wrong car park and should have gone to another one, which of course hadn’t been signed at all. The wrong car park did however have an O&T entrance, but when I went there, they wouldn’t allow me in, as apparently I needed to go to the “other one” across the course. They wouldn’t let me through to go to the unsigned, correct one. I had to go back to the car, drive round and find the unsigned correct one and go through the whole process again. They then wouldn’t accept my wife as an owner at the O&T entrance, and the usual embarrassment started of proving who you were. The staff at O&T had obviously been through the same charm school as the car park attendants. The training had certainly been effective – it was consistently dreadful, rude behaviour.

The famous bloodstock agent, David Redvers, on his web site, has something called Redvers’ Rant. I’m obviously launching a new series to rival that called Hughes’s Horrors. Maybe I’ve just reached the age of Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave. If you hear someone ambling round the course muttering, “I just don’t believe it”, you’ll know it’s either David, Victor or me.

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.

The Cheltenham Festival – The Ace in the Pack. It’s Certainly Bigger, But Is It Better?

My wife and I went along to The Centaur at Prestbury Park on Sunday to listen to an excellent OLBG-sponsored preview evening chaired by Jeremy Kyle, with the panel consisting of Ruby Walsh, A.P. McCoy, John Francome and Fergal O’Brien. John was definitely the star of the evening – informative and witty in equal measure. I believe, probably like many people, that he’s the finest NH jockey I’ve seen and certainly the one with the best sense of humour. Throughout the evening he was the butt of lots of Kyle comments, but he wafted them away with wit and aplomb, even at the interval when Kyle kept emphasising that the show had to stop to enable John to go to the toilet. Rather grossly, when he came back, he enquired whether he’d had time to “empty his bag”. We all know that Mr. Kyle spends lots of time with losers, so he’s probably not used to dealing with one of the all-time stars of the game. At one point during the evening John was reflecting on how, in the early days, he had to fill in a form stating who he wanted contacting in the event of a serious accident on the course. He just wrote on the form, “a doctor”. Oh, for the days when racing was more light-hearted, and real characters dominated the stage.

Listening to John also had me thinking back to the first time I went to the Festival in 1981. What was the big talking point on Day One that year? Anyone who was there will immediately say it was the famous Francome pull on Sea Pigeon going into the last hurdle. The horse was travelling so well, he didn’t want to hit the front too early, so the brakes were put on before he scampered away from the magnificent Monksfield to win by seven lengths at the top of the hill – the most breathtaking piece of riding I’ve seen in National Hunt.

Nothing like nostalgia in our sport, is there, and all the debates on who the greatest horses of all time would be, and the best trainers, jockeys and dare I say it, even owners. Mentioning Monksfield is what the marketing and media types call a “segue” – a link to another subject. He wasn’t a big horse at all, but an incredibly game battler who had a huge, raking stride on him. In Owners for Owners, we’re in the really fortunate position to have a horse with a similar and almost freakish action in Acey Milan, who at the time of writing this blog is 3rd favourite for the Champion Bumper and on form, having won two Listed bumpers at Cheltenham and Newbury, is the second top rated horse in the race and the highest rated bumper in Great Britain. He’s had quite a long season now, with four races – three wins and one second – so how well he does depends on whether he has held his form going into the Festival. As he can only have a fifth bumper run in a Listed race, we didn’t really have any choice but to head into the Champion, and once he’d won the top-quality Newbury bumper by 11 lengths we all decided that he had to take his chance. No matter what happens this week, he looks a lovely prospect for the future.

The only similarity I have with John Francome is age, and the four days of the current Festival certainly take their toll – on the liver and the aching knees as I rack up miles of walking around the course and mountainous climbs up the various stands. It sometimes feels like a test of endurance, with similarities to the 4m National Hunt Chase on Day One, which hopefully Anthony Honeyball (trainer of Acey Milan) will win with Ms Parfois.

One of the recurring themes throughout the week is bound to be whether the predominance of Cheltenham is sometimes to the detriment of National Hunt racing. Superficially it seems obvious that the whole Festival frenzy is a most wonderful promotion of racing as well as a huge revenue-generator. When I saw Sea Pigeon the attendance was a quarter of what it is now, and the facilities were dreadful in comparison. This week, over a quarter of a million people are likely to attend. If they all spend, say, £100 minimum getting in and having a few drinks on the course, then as the Americans would say, “do the math”. Indeed with Guinness at a fiver and a glass of wine at a tenner, it doesn’t take long to get past that minimum figure.

It’s probably inevitable that the four-day Festival will soon span five days, with the Gold Cup on Saturday. For the large numbers of people for whom the Festival is all about being at a big occasion and drinking yourself horizontal, it doesn’t really matter. If you’re an afficionado who wants to see the most competitive, highest quality racing, then the risk is dilution of that through a wider range of additional races that trainers can pick and mix from. As we’re now in an era where four trainers in Messrs. Elliott, Henderson, Mullins and Nicholls, and prime owners such as Gigginstown, J.P. McManus, Simon Munir / Isaac Suede and Rich Ricci, there is an increasing risk that trainers and owners with their top horses can avoid the competition that genuinely produces champions. However, I’m sure that economics will prevail and that the mighty, heroic clashes of yesteryear become less frequent, which is a real pity.

In the last blog I mentioned how much I’d enjoyed going over to Leopardstown for the two-day Dublin Festival. Even in my dotage I think that I could survive a two-day Cheltenham Festival, which of course is never going to happen, but that would be my absolute ideal. Three days I thought was excellent; I’m dubious about four; and I definitely wouldn’t attend five. Of course, if Acey Milan has ended up by winning the Champion Bumper, then I can probably invest in a top-of-the-range zimmer frame.

Enjoy the week, everyone.

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.

We’ve Had the NH Trainers’ Owners’ Days – So Proper Racing is About to Start

For enthusiastic National Hunt owners, September is usually all about attending the elaborate owners’ days put on by the vast majority of National Hunt trainers. Not many Flat trainers do this, as it is pretty challenging to organise a parade of skittish yearlings or 2yos, but it is an enjoyable feature of the National Hunt world which owners really look forward to. As we’ve gone through September all our NH trainers have had these days, so a special thank-you to Messrs. Hobbs, Honeyball, Keighley, Longsdon and Snowden, and also their wives, assistant trainers, secretaries, head grooms and all the staff and helpers. Oh yes – and the horses.

An immense amount of work goes into these owners’ days, and they can come with a not inconsiderable cost. Yard improvements that have been under way over the summer have to be completed; boxes scrubbed clean and repainted; invitations sent out; brochures written and printed; marquees assembled and various purveyors of plentiful food and wine contracted for the day. Stress levels and blood pressure inevitably rise as a million and one last-minute things have to be done. But it’s definitely worthwhile, with a huge amount of goodwill engendered and a really strong sense of yard identity fostered.

It is interesting how the format of the owners’ day can vary between trainers. Philip organised a formal lunch in a marquee with horses not paraded (unless the owners requested this), but a full commentary provided by Philip, Richard Johnson, Johnson White and Mick Fitzgerald. Anthony held his event inside his enormous indoor school from mid/late afternoon, with a plentiful supply of top-quality canapes and cakes, champagne and wine. Martin paraded all his horses and then cantered them around his brand-new, state-of-the-art, two-furlong carpet loop before the owners demolished a hog roast and a prodigious amount of soft drinks, Pilsner lager and wine (served by the author of this blog, with enthusiasm if not a particularly great amount of skill). Charlie organised a mid-morning gourmet brunch for owners, followed by a parade of horses. He was also brave enough to school a number of horses. The parade and schooling were also open to the general public, proving very popular, with several hundred non-owners turning up. Finally Jamie had a parade of horses with the commentary supported by the amusing Richard Pitman, followed by a Thai-themed lunch and bar. Great variety in timings, formats, food and drink, but a strong common denominator of lots of enjoyment.

Everyone in British Racing talks about the need to “maximise the owner experience” as a prime means of attracting new owners into the sport and retaining the current ones. For me, the organisation by trainers of owners’ days is one of the greatest contributions to helping owners really enjoy the sport. It’s very interesting listening to the trainers’ comments on their various horses; the hopes and dreams that we all have at this stage of the year are firmly alive, with so much to look forward to; and it is one of the few opportunities where owners can meet and network with all the other owners, friends and families associated with the yard.

Despite the cost and the considerable workload, long may our NH trainers continue with these enjoyable events. Many thanks to everyone concerned, and may all the yards I have mentioned have a tremendously successful season – not least with our Owners for Owners 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.

The Ballad of Thady Quil – A Parable on Financial vs. Emotional Return on Ownership

It’s always very interesting talking to owners about what they want from the ownership experience. The more you’re involved in racing and the better you get to know owners and trainers, so the more complex the whole equation becomes around the various factors that contribute to a really positive owner experience.

At one end of the spectrum a lot of owners I know couldn’t really care less whether the horse wins or not. They just want to be on the inside track of racing, close to trainers and, most importantly, close to the absolutely superb animal that is the racehorse. They don’t mind standing in the mud on a cold winter’s day, cheering on a mediocre horse as it (slowly) makes its own way home in a Cl.5 or Cl.6 at a country track. If the horse manages to win it is a fantastic bonus for them, but it is not the economics that determine whether they enjoy owning racehorses or not. For them, the emotional return on ownership is everything.

However at the other end of the scale I know an equal number of owners for whom the financial return on ownership is extremely important. While they love the whole experience of racing and owning, they look at everything through the prism of finances and commercial return. Because we all know that the prize-money in British racing is amongst the worst in the world, this financial perspective is often more to do with stopping loss rather than making any profit. So they tend to take a very realistic and pragmatic view on horses and if the animal is unlikely to win at, say, Cl.4 or better, then it has to be moved on as soon as possible.

The more horses you own, the more you tend to move along that spectrum where the commercial return matters. Because with mediocre horses you are losing 92p in the £, you soon develop the mentality that it is better to come out of the horse rather than stay with it. The dynamic between these two very different types of owner and owner experience is probably the hardest aspect to manage when running partnerships, as in Owners for Owners.

One of our horses, Thady Quil, neatly illustrates both ends of the spectrum. He was bought at the Brightwells sale as a gorgeous prospect. We were dreaming of Cheltenham successes with this beautiful, big and sturdy son of Stowaway. We didn’t name him, but his namesake (actually spelt “Quill”) was a well-known Irish character immortalised in The Ballad of Thady Quill. Listen to it on the following link: www.youtube.com. You can even sing along to it, as we adapted the ballad for our horse. Here’s our verse:

For runnin’ and jumpin’ and winnin’ his races
And leadin’ the field up the Cheltenham hill,
In all your days’ racin’ you’ll see nothing finer
Than the great chestnut gelding, the bold Thady Quil.

What dreams we had. Unfortunately when we took him home to Martin Keighley’s and trained him, we soon realised that his wind wasn’t everything it should have been. His debut for us was at Newton Abbot on 7th May 2015, and he was pulled up – the first of six such occurrences. The renowned wind surgeon, Ben Brain, worked through three operations of increasing severity until there was nothing more that could be done. In between the disappointing episodes of pulling up, there were a number of encouraging performances, most notably at Warwick when Thady came 2nd to Paul Nicholls’ El Bandit, who is now running off OR 141. But these were rare glimpses of the potential within, and for most of the time the wind prevented our horse showing his “inner racehorse”. The mark dropped steadily until on 5th July this year at Worcester he was running off 82 in the Worcester News Handicap Chase, Class 5, 0-100.

By then, half the partnership had dropped out, the economic return on ownership having kicked in. Not enough fun for the money. Not everyone relishes Family Fun Days of summer jumping.

Thady Quil – Spot the Owner

So what does Thady do on 5th July … he wins by 12 lengths from Cry Fury, with the 3rd horse another 20 lengths back. Finally, finally, he gets his day in the sun, winning the huge purse of £3,119. Racing Post comments were along the lines of: “travelled smoothly, jumped well, drew away for a comfortable win”. Those of us close to Thady, who absolutely adore him, shot straight off the scale of the emotional return on ownership – huge pleasure, deep joy and a profound delight that our lovely horse had finally showed us a glimpse of what we always thought he was capable of.

The handicapper promptly banged him up by 15lbs, which I have to say is a complete disgrace for a horse who has had three serious wind ops and finally managed a win in a race that fell apart around him. Once again it highlighted the appalling economic return with the handicapper doing everything possible to block the luxury of a repeat. Who knows, maybe Thady will prove him right, and nothing would give me greater pleasure for the owners who elected to keep the faith. Their emotional return is something they will never forget. Go, Thady!

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.

The Three Keys to Successful Trainer : Owner Relationships – Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

In early days when I did a lot of management training, I used to joke that the vast majority of people believe that they are good in bed, great car drivers and excellent communicators. Occasionally people would take offence, as some probably will do about this blog, and there were always a few who, for whatever reason, immediately admitted that they were terrible at all three. My response was always the same – while I wouldn’t dare comment on the first two, I would be pretty confident that very few would pass the test of excellence in communication. I then used to set up a series of exercises involving video recording of different types of communication that pretty quickly proved that I was right.

Interestingly, if you talk to trainers about communication the distribution is always massively skewed to their perception that they are good at it. Alas, in my experience it is the same as in the management training scenario –a very small number indeed are consistently and reliably good at communicating with owners. Having made that statement, these would be my ten tests of excellence. Why not rate your own trainer(s) out of 10 and see what score they get. I’ll leave it to others to assess their prowess in other fields of activity!?!

1. Asking owners about communication. In all my years of owning horses not one trainer has ever asked me any questions whatsoever about how I would like them to communicate with me, with what frequency, through which medium and about which aspects of the horse’s development and performance. Not a good start.
2. Authenticity of communication. Any idiot can communicate, but the question is whether it is meaningful, genuine, honest and authentic. We can all sense immediately when we are not being spoken to in a truthful and timely manner. I have encountered the full range of this in my ownership career, from meaningful and helpful through to downright deceptive and pointless. Hardly surprising that none of the trainers at the negative end of the scale lasted very long.
3. Frequency of communication. If trainers bothered to talk to me about this, I’d always say that my communication preference is for regular, weekly updates, ideally on a Sunday morning, by phone or email. As I always do a Sunday update on our horses, this would help me enormously. Even now, I still have to chase some trainers. They should be the proactive ones, not me. After all, it’s my choice whether to go to or stay with them, or not.
4. Using the channels of communication. There have never been more channels, and different types of medium to select. Trainers can communicate by phone, fax, email, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, with photos, videos, audio messages etc. They can even try face-to-face. That mix of communication, and how it is best used, can only really be clear if Question 1 has been followed – “How do you want me to communicate with you?”
5. Communicating setbacks. Absolutely vital that if a horse has any setback, no matter how minor, owners know about it as soon as possible. A number of years ago a trainer even had the audacity to geld my horse without my being aware of it. Correction, I should have said “ex-trainer”!
6. Race planning and communication. Some trainers enter every race imaginable for your horse without any proper discussion. Some then do the same on selecting the race. Not only can that waste a huge amount of money, but it is extremely frustrating, particularly if you are organising partnerships or syndicates. Owners need at least an indication of the probability of a run so as to make plans to attend.
7. Raceday communication. Ideally, owners meet up with the trainer on the track before the race in a relaxed way, for a highly personalised briefing. Not easy, particularly on a busy race-day when the trainer has other runners. All too frequently you meet with your trainer while the horse is being saddled up, and if the trainer can’t attend it is with a member of staff who doesn’t really know you. That doesn’t give much time for meaningful dialogue, particularly with a large ownership group.
8. Immediate post-race communication and feedback. We all know as owners that we are dealing with disappointment probably, on average, nine races out of ten. If there is an area where trainers need to excel, it is in dealing with that disappointment. It is vital for there to be balanced communication that looks for the positives while also dealing with the negatives in a realistic and sensible manner.
9. Communication the day after a race. It is absolutely vital that the trainer or a member of their staff contact you the next day with an update on the horse, particularly if there is a possibility of a physical issue or injury. Again the ideal is a communication coming out around a fixed time, such as 10:00. That way the horse can have been examined and trotted out. Vets can also have made an assessment.
10. Communicating expectations and key decisions. The famous phrase is that success in life is expectation minus reality. If the expectations are built up too high, then everyone is doomed to failure. A difficult balance to achieve in practice. It is amazing though how many horses are potential Group winners until they step on to the track for the first time. Most trainers over-hype horses most of the time. That doesn’t help at arriving on key decisions, either to do with selection of race targets or for that matter when to move a horse on – sell, retire or rehome it.

I think that will do for the moment – there are doubtless far more than ten, not least because everyone has their own communication style and requirements. What would yours be? What would encourage you to stay with a trainer? If I was a trainer, I would certainly want to know what would discourage you, as that can quickly lead to an owner having no more horses in the future, and / or removing them to somewhere else where communication is excellent.

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.

More Fabulous Festivals, the Remarkable Roodee … and the Scary FOBTs

A fairly short blog for the mid-month, as we’re in the middle of racing festivals. We were down at Newmarket for both days of the Guineas meeting and thoroughly enjoyed it. Tremendously impressed by the nonchalant win of Churchill in the 2000 Guineas, and clearly Ballydoyle is firing on all cylinders at the moment. Their run of form continued into Chester last week, notably with the first three home in the Chester Vase. During the trip to Newmarket we had a morning in the Palace House Museum & Art Gallery. This is the original palace used by Charles II, and has been renovated superbly. The exhibits really bring to life the fabulous history and legacy of racing, and some of the artwork is truly awesome. An excellent time was spent there, and well worth a visit or two.

You may know that Chester is my home town, and my interest in racing was really kindled there. I had an uncle who was very keen on racing, who always used to go to the Chester Cup meeting. The grammar school in Chester was just round the corner from the Roodee and, particularly when I was in the sixth form, we had a lot of private study periods which meant I could easily bonk off and go racing. I used to keep one eye on the form and one for teachers who were doing exactly the same. If I enjoyed Chester as a race track then, it is absolutely incredible the way facilities and quality have improved in the intervening 50 years. Not least, it is probably one of the most progressive tracks in the country when it comes to the owner experience, and can only be congratulated for the £500 appearance money that is now paid to owners for running there. This is a model initiative that should be vigorously fought for by the ROA and the Horsemen’s Group. As an absolute minimum owners ought to be able to recover the costs of supporting all the key revenue streams associated with the racecourses and the betting industry. Also the quality of food and hospitality in the owners’ marquee is absolutely second to none. All in all, Chester is a course that you really want to go to.

At the other end of the scale I also saw an encouraging note about Newton Abbot, which is now promising over £1m of prize-money during its summer racing. This is a notably well-run racecourse and it just shows what can be done with enthusiastic and progressive leadership. They are also very supportive of owners and one of the few courses where entry to races is free. They also have the best free cake for owners of any course that I know in the country.

On a completely different subject, I saw a positively scary analysis done by Landman Economics earlier in May on fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs). As anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, I’m a huge critic of the betting industry, particularly the retail bookmakers. Just consider this analysis:

• £45.5bn has apparently been staked on FOBTs since their legal status was clarified by the Gambling Act, 2008.
• Punters have lost £11.4bn in total during that period. The average lost by every FOBT player in the UK is £8,000.
• Almost 40% of the losses are from an estimated 300,000 “problem” FOBT players, who have lost an estimated £15,000 each.
• The study estimates that the loss of that money and its impact on the families concerned has cost 186,000 jobs over nine years.

There is very little that I would agree with in Labour’s Manifesto, but I’m definitely in favour of one of the recommendations whereby they want the stake on FOBTs to be reduced to a maximum of £2. At the moment, the machines allow customers to bet / lose up to £100 every 20 seconds on the likes of electronic roulette. This is a social issue that really must be addressed. True to form, the antediluvian Association of British Bookmakers described the report as “pure fantasy”. So much for the meaningless and trite statement that the bookmakers use in their marketing materials of “when the fun stops, stop”. If only the retail bookmakers would stop, reconsider almost the whole of their strategy and start rebuilding betting with a committed emphasis on innovation and fair play. Not much sign of that!

Which is another reason why I’m such a fan of Chester: they were the first course to set up their own Tote, and I’m really hoping that the whole of British racing gets behind the initiative to set up racecourse-owned totes, so that the profit from them can be invested in British racing.

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.

Creativity and Greater Liberalisation of Colours May Encourage Some Owners to Come into the Sport

Ever since we set up Owners for Owners we have differed from the vast majority, if not all, of partnerships and syndicates by not having our own colours. Our horses race in the colours of one of our owners, drawn by ballot every season. If an owner doesn’t have colours, we encourage and help them to select a set of racing silks because we genuinely believe that watching a horse race in one’s colours adds significantly to the overall owner experience. If you look on the Home Page of our web site, you’ll see photographs of recent winners, all of them in the colours of different owners.

So it was with some interest that I saw on the Racehorse Owners Association web site details of an imminent auction of six sets of racing silks that have never been seen before, and which are vibrant and multi-coloured, to say the least. You can see them on www.roa.co.uk, and you may need to put the sunglasses on beforehand! Whether you like them or not is not the issue, because it is really all about whether the racing industry can and should liberalise the rules on racing colours, thereby increasing the number of available designs and colours beyond the current restrictions.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the racing industry worldwide has a distinct, and for a lot of the time necessary, tendency towards rules and bureaucracy. In Britain they are covered by our domestic rules of racing and there are international requirements and restrictions as well. At the moment there is a limit of 25 allowable designs on the jacket, 12 on the sleeves, 10 on the cap and then an allowable two shades on each of the jacket, sleeves and cap. I haven’t calculated this but have been told that this results in 12 million combinations of colours, and putting that in context there are currently 14,000 sets of colours registered.

When I was a member of the BHA’s pillar team on ownership, as part of the strategy for growth, a business case was developed that I found very compelling and convincing. We recommended that there should be a liberalisation of racing colours, thereby increasing the number of colours, permutations and allowable designs. Not everyone, of course, would be in favour of this and we accepted that it could lead to some confusion, problems for judges, commentators, racegoers, racecard production and the TV. Aesthetically, some people wouldn’t like designs that they felt were garish and there was also the possibility that inadvertently someone’s intellectual property rights or branding could be infringed, leading to legal challenge.

Notwithstanding all the potential negatives, however, the positives appear dramatically to outweigh them. The two most important arguments in favour of greater flexibility are to enhance the overall owner experience (particularly for different types of owner) and hopefully to attract completely new kinds of owner into racing. More specifically, football clubs, universities, pubs, golf clubs, companies etc. all have logos and branding that they are proud of and to which they are emotionally committed. Indeed in some of the sporting clubs you can argue that there is almost a tribal element associated with the colours. If racing allowed the incorporation of these colours then, the argument goes, it might well be much easier to persuade them to invest in ownership of racehorses. At the top end there is a powerful case for corporate partnering and brand alignment between racing and very affluent third parties.

If the broad principle of liberalisation of colours is accepted, then racing can look for ways of maximising the opportunities for ownership as well as additional income streams. For example once you have the colours of companies of major sporting clubs on a horse, then you may be able to persuade such organisations actively to sponsor yards. A tiering of colours could create an opportunity for different levels of charging between more routine colours and premium ones. Colour auctions can be established (as in the trial at the end of this month), both of new, highly creative colours and older, dormant ones.

I really hope this is an initiative that leads to a tremendous amount of creativity, flexibility and new owners coming into the sport. As a minimum it should encourage stronger personalisation and self-expression on the part of owners, and could be one important element in maximising the overall ownership experience. Bring on the sunglasses!

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.

ROA National Racehorse Owners Survey – Part 2, Identifying the Key Factors in Acquisition and Retention

My wife and I were lucky enough to be at our favourite racecourse – York – to watch the Nunthorpe, won in devastating style by Mecca’s Angel. Such a tough horse, and a superb buy at only 16,000 guineas out of Book 2 Tattersalls October Yearling Sale in 2012. She is the first filly to win the Nunthorpe twice, and it was a delight to watch the turbo-chargers kick in as she scorched through the final furlong. David Metcalfe, the owner, was clearly delighted and the whole experience was everything that owners aspire to. In a rather less restrained celebration, the Here For The Craic partnership couldn’t believe their fortune when – every syndicate’s dream – Heartbreak City won the Ebor for Tony Martin. These results, and the York racecourse experience, sum up what brings owners into the game and keeps them there.

However the backdrop for the first National Racehorse Owners Survey (summarised in the blog on 15th August) is the ongoing decline in ownership since the financial crisis of 2008. Numbers coming in were lower than numbers going out in seven of the last eight years, although encouragingly there has started to be some improvement recently.  The headline messages from the survey, of over 2,200 current and lapsed owners, include:

• 73% of owners start out with others, particularly friends, family or through a syndicate.
• 53% of owners say that speaking to a trainer or visiting a yard is the most influential step in their decision to own. However, 44% of owners say that there isn’t enough information available on costs, income or prize-money in the public domain to make that decision.
• 45% of current owners would increase their number of horses in training if prize-money increased.
• 44% of lapsed owners cite facilities and treatment of owners at racecourses as a key factor in their decision to give up ownership.
• Three out of four lapsed owners would return to owning if the circumstances were right.

The survey has been analysed under three main themes of the owner, the trainer and the racecourse experience. The more the results of the survey were examined, the more it became clear to us that the factors bringing owners into the sport are not necessarily the same as those that drive them out. This is illustrated in our diagram below, while drawing on the survey’s findings.

A Dual Industry-Wide Strategy is Required: Attracting AND Retaining Owners

 

 

Doubtless the analysis and conclusions from the survey will feed into the BHA’s Strategy for Growth and all the operational planning associated with its implementation. Our recommendation is that in the light of the dual factor model outlined, there needs to be a similar dual strategy with different goals and interventions. Acquiring new owners is closely linked to marketing, PR and timely, detailed and transparent provision of information about ownership, particularly while potential owners are visiting trainers. Retaining owners is much more challenging because of the inevitable disappointments of ownership, the high relative costs and dissatisfaction with racecourse facilities. It is essential that the industry doesn’t just concentrate on marketing and PR campaigns, but addresses properly the financial and experiential factors driving unnecessarily high owner churn rates. Indeed we would argue that this should be the prime strategic imperative of the BHA’s Strategy for Growth. 

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.

ROA National Racehorse Owners Survey – Part 1, A Summary of the Results

When I took part in the BHA’s pillar strategy process a couple of years ago, one of the frustrations was the lack of facts and data on which to ground discussions and the formulation of important initiatives. The Racehorse Owners Association (ROA) felt exactly the same, and were determined to canvass both current and lapsed owners to find out their views, particularly in terms of what brings them into the sport, retains them and indeed drives them out of ownership. In this first blog on the subject I have done no more than list out the results from the survey. In the second part, on 1st September, I’ll do my own analysis and draw conclusions on what I think the survey actually tells us.

Encouragingly there was a good sample size, with 2,203 responses including a number of “hard to reach” owner samples such as new owners with less than two years’ ownership experience (255) and lapsed owners (203). Interesting to see that the average age of a racehorse owner is 59; the percentage of lapsed owners who cite facilities and treatment of owners at racecourses as a factor in their decision to give up ownership is 44%; the duration of ownership is longer for ROA members; the satisfaction rating of the ownership experience is higher for syndicate members than for sole owners; and the percentage of lapsed owners who would like to own horses again is 73%.

Theme 1: Owner Experience Results

1. 73% of racehorse owners started out with others.
2. Nearly one in four owners have taken a break, most due to finances or horse injury.
3. The most influential steps to ownership are speaking to a trainer or other owners.
4. New owners take more decision steps and are more likely to research online.
5. Ownership is born out of family history, keen interest in racing or attraction to the excitement.
6. New and syndicate owners think of the excitement above the expense.
7. Owners are not likely to recommend owning a racehorse to their friends.
8. Costs and prize-money are primary lapse reasons, racecourse and trainer experience crucial.
9. Three out of four lapsed owners would return to owning if the circumstances were right.
10. ROA members are much more likely to remain in ownership for longer.

Theme 2: Trainer Experience Results

1. The most influential steps to ownership are speaking to a trainer or other owners: 53% say that speaking to a trainer or visiting a yard is the key step, and for 22% it is speaking to other owners.
2. Owners want more information on costs and trainers: particularly on training fees, engagement and the owner experience, income and expenditure, and clear cost models so owners know what they are getting into.
3. Trainers are approachable but could communicate more information, more regularly.
4. Costs and prize-money are primary lapse reasons for 80% of lapsed owners; trainer experience (29%) is also crucial.

Theme 3: Racecourse Experience Results

1. The racecourse is the pinnacle of the ownership experience: the primary motivation to become an owner is the enjoyment of watching your horse run.
2. Racecourses are the shop window to ownership, not the salesmen: speaking to someone at a racecourse is not a crucial step in the decision to become a racehorse owner.
3. New owners are motivated more by the social aspects of racing: particularly with combined with the enjoyment of watching your horse run as well as the non-raceday social elements.
4. Winning is an important bonus, not the be-all and end-all: fewer than one in 12 owners believe that winning is everything.
5. Costs and prize-money are primary lapse reasons for 80% of lapsed owners; racecourse experience (44%) is also crucial.

In the second blog on the survey, the intention is to explore whether there may well be a “two factor” model working here. I know that sounds a bit jargony, but it could be that there are subtle but important differences between the factors that bring people into the sport and those that discourage them and ultimately may drive them out of the game. Thinking caps on over the next fortnight on that hypothesis.

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 to “segway” from Beer Consumption to Growing Racehorse Ownership in British Racing – A Further Note on the BHA’s Growth Strategy

I was delighted to read of a research study done by the Mediterranean Neurological Institute concluding that moderate daily beer consumption reduces the risk of heart and circulatory diseases by a quarter. Apparently the phenols in the flavour act as an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory and also protect the body against viruses. Here in the Hawling Institute we have also concluded through even more extensive research over many years that combining this with red wine drinking guarantees receipt of a telegram from the Queen on reaching your century.

So a number of our owners put this latest finding into practice this week at York for the Dante meeting, not least celebrating a game 4th by our horse Jolievitesse on the opening day. Readers of this blog will know that I believe York Racecourse sets the bar for the total owner and racegoer experience. They are continuing to invest heavily at the track, with prize-money this year increasing to £7m despite a £200,000 decrease in levy funding. Last year they achieved record turnover and attendances. Their £60m-plus investment in facilities for horses, horsemen and racegoers over the last 20 years has paid handsome dividends. Jolievitesse’s race was only Class 4 but had a prize fund of £15,000 with £9,700 for the winner but still £721 for the 4th. The 20-runner field will have guaranteed significant betting and substantial levy contribution. It is this virtuous circle that racing is striving to achieve on a broader basis.

We weren’t however debating racing politics after this fine run, but there was a fair bit of discussion about how good the York experience is, particularly when you are staying in country hotels and dining in excellent restaurants. If you’re in the area, do visit The Crown Inn at Roecliffe. I don’t know of any course that offers such good value, with champagne at £30 a bottle and Theakston’s best bitter at £3.30 a pint, readily available in their new bar set up to offer local beers. Indeed York makes a big point of the partnerships they have developed with local suppliers of beef, smoked salmon, trout and fine cheeses from Ryedale, Wensleydale and Hambleton. I bet you feel hungry now! Courses can do a lot more to showcase local produce. Cheltenham did so at the October meeting and it was a great success.

The racing at York, as usual, was top-class, not least the superb runs by So Mi Dar in the Musidora and Wings Of Desire in the Dante. John Gosden came up with a nice comment about his now Derby favourite, that what he most enjoys is “eating and sleeping”. If you add in drinking beer and wine as well, it would cover most of the Owners for Owners network!

So York racecourse definitely demonstrates what can be done to enthuse racehorse owners. At the BHA forum I attended at Newbury on 1st March, Richard Wayman made a typically strong presentation in which he balanced discussion on the disappointing contraction in the UK ownership base (horse population down 9% from 2008; steady decline in registered owners over the same period, down 17%) and an analysis of its causation (the poor economics of ownership in the UK; a need to strengthen owner engagement; insufficient promotion of ownership, not least in syndicates; and needlessly complex ownership structures, systems and fees) with an outline of a number of practical initiatives to improve the situation.

Obviously the key to prize-money is tied in with levy replacement and capturing racing’s rightful contribution from the offshore bookmakers. I’ve covered that before in the blog, so won’t touch on it again. Richard, though, emphasised that it is not all about prize-money and stated strongly that owners must feel valued within racing, and clearly trainers and racecourses are at the heart of that. There is also apparently going to be a major innovation to streamline ownership administration from early 2017 as well as a big push on ownership, particularly with a campaign to promote syndication. There will be a central ownership hub, close liaison with racecourses and the introduction of a code of conduct for syndicates, thereby ensuring far more transparency and helping prospective owners make a more informed choice.

As this was right at the heart of why we set up Owners for Owners, we feel vindicated. Time to reflect on this with a couple of pints of Donnington’s Best Bitter in The Plough at Ford, my local watering hole just round the corner from Martin Keighley’s stables. Maybe it’s time to think about a Plough partnership.

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.

What are the Motivations of Owners to Own, and What Demotivates Them?

It’s funny how the start of the year seems to have thrown up a huge number of subjects for me to write about in the blog. Initially I started drafting one on the change of broadcasting contract from Channel 4 to ITV, but I was also considering coverage of Ascot and Cheltenham prize-money increases, Richard Johnson’s 3,000th NH winner, authorised betting partner stand-offs and whether Ladbrokes will lose the sponsorship of the World Hurdle, whip bans / rules, etc.

However, I’ve just been invited to be interviewed by a research group for a study that is being carried out for the Department for Culture, Media & Sport on the economics of the horseracing industry. This is taking place today, so in preparation for it I started thinking about what motivates and demotivates owners. Many decades ago, when I was studying social psychology at university, I liked the “two factor theory” of a chap called Herzberg. He suggested a range of factors that motivate people in work and another set that had the opposite effect. Sometimes they are one and the same, but equally they can vary.

Interestingly in the recent BHA Review of Jump Racing there is a section that explores the problems of low return on ownership while arguing for a greater emphasis on the pleasures of owning horses through an emotional return on ownership. That resonates with one of my new year resolutions as an owner: we often see the “Keep Calm and Carry On” message, but I’m trying to adopt my own racehorse-owning version as “Stay Positive and Keep Spending”. I’m sure that all the OfO trainers will be delighted to hear that!

So, bringing these ideas together, I’ve created a chart of ten “satisfiers” of being an owner and then ten “dissatisfiers”. Do let me know what you think about them. By the way, this is only a listing – I’m not implying a prioritisation. I’m sure there is an interesting research study to be done in that area. One for the ROA?

DISSATISFIERS	SATISFIERS
Emotional return on ownership: Low Financial return on ownership: Low;	Emotional return on ownership: High Financial return on ownership: High
Factors that may drive an owner out of the sport and / or lead to a reduction in ownership involvement.	Factors that may attract or retain an owner into the sport and / or lead to an increase in ownership involvement.
Experiencing a horse fatality or serious injury that keeps the horse away from the track.	Buying and owning a winning, progressive racehorse that stays sound over several seasons.
Making the costly mistake of selecting a poor performing trainer with the wrong personal values.	Selecting and working with a competent, professional and empathetic trainer.
Winning next to nothing in prize-money and finding that place money doesn’t cover the costs of racing.	Securing sufficient prize-money to mitigate some costs and provide some capital for reinvestment.
Finding yourself in a racing syndicate when the trainer, racing manager and owners don’t get on.	Forming close friendships with like-minded co-owners, trainers and within the racing community.
Discovering that the horse possesses little potential and / or was sold to you with physical defects.	Buying a young horse and watching it develop over a number of seasons to realise its potential.
Frequenting lesser tracks at lowlier meetings to watch your horse finish way down the field.	Savouring the buzz and excitement of racing as an owner at the larger meetings and race tracks.
Being treated as a “wallet on legs” with costs continually going up and prize-money coming down.	Feeling that your financial investment is properly valued by trainers, racecourses and the industry.
Poor car parks, problems with badges, hostile O&T desks, dreadful food and inadequate facilities.	A high quality, hassle-free ownership experience when going racing.
Infrequent and over-optimistic communication leading to a mismatch of expectations.	Regular, comprehensive and honest communication and feedback from a trainer using a range of media.
Inflexible and overly harsh handicapping forcing the horse to race at the wrong grade for too long.	Being able to enter your horse in races that it can win, without unnecessary cost or restriction.

Doubtless every owner would have their own personal list of positives and negatives. I’ll be interested to hear more from you, in particular about the factors that could encourage you to increase involvement and own more horses, and equally the combination of factors that would make you decide to cut back or even abandon the sport. In view of the centrality of ownership to racing, it is absolutely amazing that there is so little information digging into this line of questioning in a properly analytical and well-researched manner.

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.

Ten Simple Steps to Improve the Owner Experience – An Action Plan for 2016

Over the autumn I’ve covered a number of the big strategic and funding issues confronting British racing. I’ve summarised how the BHA has framed its strategic vision, created a new governance structure and set a small number of key targets:

• Increase the number of horses in training – 1,000 additional horses on average by 2020;
• Raise betting participation levels – up 5% by 2018;
• Increase racecourse attendance levels – reaching 7m by 2020;
• Secure new income for the sport - £120m p.a. by 2018.

The bottom line is that racing needs growth and, particularly, to secure considerably greater income and investment, not least to attract and retain owners in the sport as the number one contributors to the game. Inevitably the big changes will take 3-5 years to be implemented, and frustratingly, shorter-term improvements often appear to be just the wrong side of the horizon. So in this blog I’ve decided to focus on a number of relatively minor changes and “feel-good factors” that hopefully will appeal to owners.

1. Celebrate Dickie Johnson as champion jockey. Everyone in racing wants Dickie to become the jump jockey champion and not succumb to any bad luck or injuries that could prevent it. Certainly the rate of wins has been extraordinary this winter, and there should be a magnificent celebration when he achieves his long-overdue ambition. As a superb ambassador and role model for racing, it would be great if racing could find a way to use him and other similar ambassadors to bring owners into the sport.
2. Launch a “smarten up” campaign for racecourses. For a relatively small amount of money, racecourses could really improve the owner experience. Each course should appoint a non-executive director to their board (an active owner) to help them on this. It’s not about superficial PR, but following the “owner journey” on the race track. So for example when owners drive to the course, signage is often poor; car parks are too far away from entrances, muddy and pot-holed; Owner & Trainer entrances are not smart enough, and are inefficient; too many O&T bars are far too small, hot and noisy, and there is a chronic lack of seating. The recent 2015 Review of Jump Racing, for example, flags up that the average age of NH sole owners is now 59.9. Start looking after them properly!
3. Acknowledge improvements with a “Track of the Month”. Lots of good things are happening at racecourses, and more acknowledgement should be given to that. Find ways to publicise better practice, particularly through the BHA, ROA and RCA. Publicise grass-roots improvement in the owner experience.
4. Introduce “local food halls” at each racecourse. The food hall at the last Paddy Power meeting at Cheltenham was a revelation to all who visited it: local cheeses, pies, beers and all sorts of artisanal goodies. Lots of scope here for racecourses to be a showcase for excellent speciality produce from their areas. Particularly worth doing at the bigger meetings.
5. Rewards 4 Owners. Rewards 4 Racing appears to have been a great success; why not launch something similar for owners, and tie it in with an incentivisation scheme? Find a way to identify owners who are investing more in the sport and who go racing more frequently, and provide them with valued benefits.
6. Promote good syndicate practice. At their best, syndicates and shared ownership schemes provide tremendous enjoyment at manageable cost. At their worst, they exploit owners and pursue fraudulent practices. Finalise a code of practice that makes clear what is meant by both good and bad practice.
7. Introduce syndicate races. Frame a series of races that are restricted to shared ownership horses, particularly at the grass-roots level. Follow the lead of tracks such as Newton Abbot and have free entry into them. Work closely with syndicates to encourage as many owners as possible to come along, and give a greater than normal allocation of O&T badges to syndicate horses.
8. Promote ownership in racecards. Why couldn’t every racecard have at least a page promoting ownership, and then tie it in with recommendation 9.
9. “Meet the Trainer” events. If there is one activity that provides so much enjoyment to current and prospective owners, it is visits to yards, and seeing horses on the gallops in their home environment. Every visitor is potentially a new owner. Set up a network of these events and advertise them through the racecourses.
10. Owners for Owners horses have a great 2016. We’ve lots of lovely young horses coming through, as well as a number of seasoned campaigners. Here is hoping that Lord Ben Stack can go on to be a Group horse; Jolievitesse to show his undoubted class; Timeless Art to be a real 3yo star; Sunday Prospect to take his owners to top tracks; Future Gilded to return from his injury; The Fugitive to build on his early promise; Bilbrook Blaze finally to put a win on the board; Thady Quil to give his owners something to sing about (particularly the Ballad of Thady Quil); and our flagship NH horse, Shantou Magic, to put his best foot forward in a valuable handicap in the spring.

All crossed for a really enjoyable New Year and throughout 2016! Looking forward to catching up over a pint of local brew in one of the new food halls!

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.

Should the Handicapper Have a Responsibility to Retain Owners in British Racing?

If there are any certainties in life other than death and taxes, it is that owners and trainers will always argue that their horses have been badly treated by the handicapper. We always feel that as with golf handicaps we’re penalised quickly for decent performances while the official handicapper only reduces the penalties at a glacial pace. Recently one of our horses, He’s A Bully, a 13-race maiden, went up 7lbs for coming second. I thought this was very harsh, as did all the owners and connections. Having had quite a whinge about it, the horse duly won his next race by 9 lengths! But we had to run him before he could be re-handicapped, so for Owners for Owners there was a happy ending to the grumble and, indeed, the mark then stayed the same.

Throughout the intervening week between the 7lb hike and winning the race, there was a lot of discussion in our owner network about He’s A Bully, basically along the lines of how harsh it is to put up a maiden for not winning. Surely any horse should be entitled to win a race before being punished? There were even more painful examples however where the handicapper has put up horses significantly for not even completing races. Again, just because a horse is going well but then falls over, say, at the final fence, surely it is overly harsh to raise the mark without even getting home.

That line of discussion got me thinking more about the handicapping system, and the core principles behind it. On the BHA web site there is a detailed guide to handicapping which contains nine formal aims:

1. To achieve a competitive race with a close finish with a view to providing an exciting sporting spectacle.
2. To ensure that every horse’s handicap rating gives it a theoretical equal chance of success on its best recent form under its optimum conditions.
3. To set an interesting puzzle that the public find intriguing to solve.
4. To aim for competitive betting in handicap races, thereby indicating that the public believe that horses have a reasonable chance of success.
5. To re-evaluate ratings after a race so that horses that have raced competitively together are weighted to, theoretically, equalise the form if they were to meet next time they ran.
6. To reduce the rating of horses which appear to be deteriorating with a view to giving them a fair chance of success.
7. To favour the majority at the expense of the minority. If one horse is rated too highly, then that one horse may not have an equal chance of success on its next start. If one horse is rated too low, however, then every horse it races against may not have an equal chance of success on their next start.
8. To keep the median ratings of all horses on file as consistent as possible with previous years. Both ‘slippage’ and ‘uppage’ within the overall rating file are undesirable as they can lead to a mismatch between the racing population and the race programme.
9. To be as open as possible with trainers and owners seeking information about their horse’s handicap rating.

You’ll see that owners only get one mention, and quite clearly all the aims are essentially to do with racing as a spectacle, and particularly betting. But as regular readers of this blog will know, the owners are the number one stakeholders in racing, making the greatest financial contribution. Nick Rust, Chief Executive of the BHA, is leading the drive to bring owners into the sport and for there to be an additional 1,000 horses in training by 2020. The other side of the coin, of course, is what to do about retaining owners who leave racing for all sorts of reasons.

Unfortunately there is very little properly gathered data examining the churn rate of owners, and I’ve certainly never seen anything at all that examines the frustration and disillusionment that can set in due to horses being handicapped to a level where it is just about impossible for them to win. Similarly I am not aware of any study having been made of owners quitting the sport and selling / retiring their horses as a result of inappropriately high handicapping. However, anecdotal evidence abounds on this subject and a number of trainers’ blogs definitely argue that the principles of handicapping are a contributing factor to high churn rates. To what extent should there be a formal aim of handicapping that focuses on the requirement to retain owners in the sport through ensuring that their horses can win or be placed a sufficient number of times? Do let me know your views on this subject. After all, there is no point pursuing expensive marketing initiatives to bring owners into the sport if it is driving them out through inappropriate handicapping of their 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.

Osarus Sale, Arcachon and the Ayr Western Meeting: All About Getting Maximum Enjoyment as an Owner

Regular readers of the blog will know that I’m a firm believer that because there are so many downs and disappointments with racehorses, it’s vital for owners to try to get as much enjoyment as they possibly can from all aspects of the ownership cycle. Being involved in partnerships with co-owners quickly forms many friendships around the common bond of owning. My wife and I certainly experienced that during September, with visits to the sales and several race meetings in the company of owners who have now become friends.

Sunday Break – Lots of weekends away
with the new horse

A couple of weeks ago we went over to the Osarus sale near Arcachon, south-west of Bordeaux, with Karl and Elaine Burke. We share Karl’s view that there are always good horses in every sale, and you don’t necessarily have to go to the premium sales and spend prodigious amounts of money to obtain them. This has certainly been the case with our last three purchases out in France at the Arqana sale in Deauville, and we’re hoping that we’ve turned up another useful prospect in a chestnut colt by the Japanese / American sire, Sunday Break. He is from the American line of Mr Prospector, and our ideal was a US-bred because they often act well on the quick ground that is becoming increasingly common in northern Europe. As you can see on the photo, he is a big, strong, precocious type, and on breeding he ought to stay middle distances. With the dream starting, one would hope that he might make it to a race such as the Chesham at Royal Ascot, but only time will tell. If not, there is a perfect 6f Listed race for him back at the Arcachon racetrack at La Teste de Buche in early August, with the French premiums boosting prize-money by 64% plus an extra premium for graduates of the Osarus sale. Interestingly this year’s Chesham winner, Suits You, was bought cheaply at Osarus.

However, it wasn’t just the sale that was enjoyable. Being with our trainer and co-owners out in Aquitaine provided opportunities for eating, drinking and good fellowship. Arcachon is the oyster capital of France, and quite a number of mighty molluscs slipped down the system, particularly at the seafront restaurant Chez Pierre, as well as a magnificent reception hosted by the Osarus sales house. One of our fellow owners also bought a Mount Nelson filly, and there is a lot of fun being had in trying to name her. You can guess why if you look at Lot 85 in the Osarus catalogue!

We flew back into the UK on the Wednesday evening and then drove almost straight up to Ayr for the start of the Ayr Western meeting. It is a 12-hour plus round trip and most people would suppose that to watch one’s horse come last would be a dismal experience. The plan was for the horse to be dropped out, with a lot of cover, and be taught to settle. Unfortunately Jolievitesse broke very quickly from the stalls and shot into the lead while the rest of the field were reined back, and then blew up at the mile post. And yet the owners had a fantastic time at Ayr during the three days and soon put the disappointment behind them. This was certainly helped by all of us having a good bet on Karl’s winning filly, Quiet Reflection, who paid for a magnificent dinner (she will probably go next to either the Cornwallis Stakes at Newmarket or a Group 2 at Maisons-Lafitte). There is a theme emerging – good meals and fine wine, in beautiful locations, with friends from racing. This time the seafood was courtesy of Scott's Bar & Restaurant at Troon harbour, looking across to Aran. At the end of the harbour is another fine restaurant, MacCallums Oyster Bar, as well as Scotland’s best fish and chip take-away alongside – Wee Hurrie. It is the only place where I’ve ever seen lobster and chips!

We’re already looking forward to the Ayr festival next year. It’s a track that looks after owners superbly well, as anyone who has enjoyed the owners’ lunch in the Western Hotel can testify. The atmosphere building to the Ayr Gold Cup is electric, and this year the crowd went crazy after the favourite, Don’t Touch, won readily. It’s rare for me to leave a meeting in profit, but I certainly did from this one, together with great memories from a really enjoyable week.

That’s it now for restaurant recommendations. Having said that, owners are going up to Yorkshire soon to see the new horse, and doubtless we’ll enjoy the sumptuous meals at the Wensleydale Heifer. Diet postponed!

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.