The Pursuit of Excellence

In 1903 our Club was founded by men and women with a passion for motoring in all its forms: racing, rallying, commuting, transport/freight and simply recreational pleasure. They fell under the thrall of the new, the exciting, the amazing: of mechanised genius. To them these machines were both complex and fascinating (perhaps why cars are always called ‘she’). They required skill to drive and even more to maintain or improve. The core raison d’être was a club that would be an expression of themselves, reflecting their interests, their personalities, their aspirations. Much more recently, in 1986, the Imperial Services Club merged into the RACA, bringing men and women who had served their flag and the empire or commonwealth. What did motoring enthusiasts and the military have in common, you might ask? An answer might be that both followed something intangible, a passion or a sense of duty residing somewhere in that cabinet called the soul, but the similarity goes beyond that. Those who compete in machines and those in the military are familiar with, and I would venture endorse, that time-honoured phrase (excusing the authentic language required): Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. The pursuit of excellence is required when designing, building and succeeding in anything to do with motoring or military campaigning.

The photograph above is the car I grew up with, one of just 32 ever produced, the Ferrari 250 LM, Chassis 6321, one of my father’s racing cars from his Scuderia Veloce team, which was Australia’s first professional motoring team. It is a car that Honorary Life Member Spencer Martin knows very well as probably its most successful driver, and later, when my father sold shares in it, a part owner. It belongs to Ralph Lauren and he took it to Paris as one of just 17 ‘best of the best’ from his world-renowned car collection, to be displayed in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs adjoining the Louvre. As a racing driver and then team manager, my father and his mechanics knew that putting a car on the track meant nothing could be left to chance, nothing could be left to crossed fingers. Vision was one thing, but strategy was the difference between an idea, a dream and making that come true, and keeping on making it perform day after day after day.

The reason I am opening my campaign for election to the board of our Club with this preamble is simple: in my view, as someone who grew up in the world of motor racing, who then founded successful businesses that assisted clients to achieve their goals, I know our Club needs the same as a successful F1 team today. And this is the difficult part, and it may upset you to hear it, but as a business person whose first duty as a board director should be to tell you the truth, our Club is still running a Business-Model T in a turbo-charged world. The Club’s business model has fundamentally run unaltered since 1903, and that is why, today in the 21st century, we are failing our founders: we have not adjusted and recalibrated. Hoping and hairpins are neither strategies nor business cases. Wanting things to get better and hoping they do, because someone will hopefully make the right decisions for us, are not strategies that guarantee success.

What is window dressing and what is wise

• $40,000: the board wants to spend around $40,000 of our money on a golf simulator. A global search found no quantifiable evidence that a non-golf club gained memberships or increased F&B by installing one. The board is relying on a hunch, sales spin and calls seeking feedback from random members of the club, and calling that a business case, which it clearly is not. Were you canvassed? Quite rightly, the CEO says we will need to figure out how to market the simulator to the CBD, but he has no marketing team and no marketing budget. It may well be a brilliant idea, but instead of trialling it, the board (with one or two exceptions) is full steam ahead, despite there being no data, no budget and no experienced marketing team to ensure success. To me this is Field of Dreams stuff: no real business case, just Hollywood-esque vibes… build it and they will come.
• $40,000: the annual AGM and elections are costing us around $40,000, because instead of investigating options the board is simply using the company it used last time. They do a great job, very polished and professional. But we could achieve the same results, independence and professionalism for around $5,000, from a company good enough for companies like Toll, Grain Corp, Veolia, KPMG, BHP and the Reserve Bank of Australia among many more. I know, because as someone running for your board I know the money is not mine to spend: it is your money. My responsibility as a director is oversight, interrogation and decisions in the best interest of the Club, which is to say the membership.
• $80,000: these two items, more or less, add up to quite a lot. Gone. Could it have been spent more wisely?

Why do I care? Because the golf simulator has no proper business case or activation budget to drive success.

Why don’t I simply trust our boards to do the right thing and just enjoy my meal?

• Because I know that every year since 1994 we have relied on either an overdraft facility or, more recently, expensive debt, to cover the annual March to June gap in cash flow to survive. Then in come the annual subscriptions and minimum pre-pay spend to top up the piggy bank, pay back the overdraft (in the good old Westpac days), and the cycle is repeated, year after year after year.
• Because we could have held these elections and the AGM for around $35,000 less than we are paying.
• Because, as someone running for your board, I know the money is not mine to spend, and because due diligence and duty of care are leadership excellence 101.

Money spent by our board is our money. The duty of care that goes with that must be front and centre of any board we vote in. And we should question, should be curious and should challenge every year at our AGMs… mostly, however, we don’t. Our Model-T business says the gold letters on the door on Level 5 should be given blind trust. I think we see enough corporate headlines in this 21st century of ours to know it doesn’t always work like that. Ayrton Senna, one of the greatest ever if not the greatest, paid the ultimate price when people who were trusted to do the right thing failed to act.

If our Club is to survive we must pursue excellence in all things: clubhouse maintenance and refurbishment; services; facilities; experiences; value propositions; vision; strategy; funding strategies; the business model; leadership competencies, accountability and performance.

Our competitors (the new private members’ clubs around the corner) are charging up to $30,000 per annum memberships and getting it, 500 members this last 12 months for The Pillars. They are capturing the very demographics that should be signing up to the RACA. Why? Because we are not offering what the private club market wants, expects and is willing to pay for.

And this brings me to something else we must do too. It is a big ask, and you may not like what I say, but I do believe it to be essential for the Club’s survival. This is a particular plea to those of us over the age of 60, of which I am one: we must put ourselves last and the Club first. We are custodians, temporary ones, who have been bequeathed a vision for a magnificent club, a very historic and important club that is part of Australian history. The building that is our clubhouse was built from the pockets of our Club’s founders and early supporters. It is a club of 123 years. It is our duty to hand the RACA to future generations in a condition better than we found it, and financially robust. We are failing in that duty. So I ask us all, myself included, to not think of what ‘we’ or ‘I’ want, but instead what the Club needs in order to not simply survive but thrive, and as the Scots say, paraphrased, with the road rising up to meet it.