A Club Like No Other

Who am I?

Second-generation country member, one of only two standing, with town experience

My father signed me up to the RACA in 1997, and I have two enduring memories of the Club. The first, for some odd reason, is of driving up to the second level of the RACA car park (where the gym now resides). I loved it: there was a feeling of expectation, of something special about to happen. The second is of crossing the Cahill Expressway, seeing the lights on behind those magnificent arched windows of the Macquarie Room, and catching a glimpse of a dining room full of diners at beautifully laid tables, knowing I would soon be joining them.

Motoring pedigree. My father was David McKay. His Sydney Morning Herald obituary was headed ‘Dashing enthusiast of motor sport’, which sums him up fairly accurately. After many years of racing himself, he founded Australia’s first professional motor racing team, Scuderia Veloce (‘Scuds’). He also wrote a column, ‘Behind the Wheel’, for Sir Frank Packer’s The Telegraph, and founded a very successful dealership network, Scuderia Veloce Motors, selling primarily Ferrari, Porsche, Volvo, MV Agusta motorcycles and, ambitiously, luxury Italian Riva speedboats.

Country (and even APC) pedigree. My mother’s family came to Australia in 1809 with Henry Colden Antill, a New Yorker by birth, who arrived as aide-de-camp to his best friend from their days in India, Lachlan Macquarie. His portrait, part of the Australian Pioneers Club (APC) collection, hangs among many other early ‘gents’ in the Billiard Room.

My mother, Elizabeth Antill, was Australia’s first female wool classer and shearer and a 9-goal polo player. She managed the family’s sheep stations around Warren, often on her own for long stretches, relying on six-monthly supplies from Anthony Hordern & Sons. For reasons known only to herself, she turned down George Falkiner (sheep) and married my father (cars).

Defence pedigree. Like most multi-generational Australian families, mine, on both sides, has served under two flags: first under the British in the Boer War, and then in WW1, at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. In WW2 my mother’s brother was in the Navy and was sunk twice, once in the North Sea and once in the Atlantic, suffering the further indignity of being arrested in Scotland because his accent aroused suspicion that he was a German spy! Rear Admiral Guy Griffiths AO DSO DSC RAN, another relative, was for a time my guardian. My father served with the Army in New Guinea during WW2. He never spoke about it, but he marched every Anzac Day. His brother became a wing commander in the RAAF. My mother was also recruited and was due for deployment to London for assignment to France when she came down with German measles. Given the life expectancy in the branch she was in, I am forever grateful to the measles, German or not.

Why I am standing

In 2023 I created the ‘Club Like No Other’ vision for another board. Three years on, we are no closer, so I have decided to pick up that vision and carry it myself.

We all love our Club, but loving it is not the same as sustaining it, and the model we rely on stopped working years ago. We are marking time. Selling assets. Asking ever more dollars of you, our loyal remainers. Still the dial does not move. Membership is at a financially unsustainable level. Claims that we are taking ‘market share’ of the CBD’s food and beverage trade could not be more illusory. We make a loss, while our competitors quietly steal the future that should be ours.

It does not have to end this way.

What we need is a clear, long-term vision and a strategy to reach it. I have both.

For ideas to succeed, they need more than a hunch, passion or wishful thinking. They require a rigorously developed framework to support them. Ideas cannot be ‘captain’s calls’ with (maybe) a budget based on a few canvassed members: that is not a business case. Mine would come with, first and foremost, the blessing of the membership’s vote for the preparatory stage: a costed, research-backed and data-driven business case for every stage and every component, and investment in execution, a business model restructured to deliver it, and Tier 1 tranche finance.

The RACA Board needs people who have founded and built businesses and turned them around; who can identify and make tough decisions; and who, importantly, bring networks to the table to fill gaps in skills and experience. We have never had anyone on the RACA Board with a solid background in every aspect of branding and marketing, or in hospitality, surely two critical skill sets for a board overseeing what is, in essence, a hospitality business, and one that needs people to know about it. Nor do I suggest we have anyone with any property experience, other than purchasing or investing for personal security.

Judge me on all of it: on the ideas; on more than 30 years as a business founder, operator and applied strategic marketing practitioner; and on my stake in this as a second-generation member.

I am asking for your support, your mandate, to bring a fresh approach to saving our Club. With the right people at the table, making the right decisions in the right order, we can deliver a RACA Renaissance.

The honest position

With apologies to JFK: ask not what our Club can do for us, but what we can do for our Club.

The numbers tell a plain story. Our Club once had well over 6,000 members, possibly many more. Today we have 1,501.

Despite good intentions, we trade at a loss, and we will continue to do so, for three very obvious reasons:

Membership. Our membership is too small to generate enough revenue to cover operating costs, especially in food and beverage (F&B), where our losses are considerable and cause the most bleeding.

A zero-sum game. We cannot keep putting pressure on our members, around 20% of whom have been loyal to the RACA for 40, 50 or more years. Continually raising annual subscriptions, pre-paid spends, parking fees, food and drink prices and room rates is like putting a very sore finger in a dyke that keeps springing leaks: the pressure is simply too much, too painful and, frankly, pointless.

Our business model. New, well-funded private members’ clubs are opening around us. Two are already operating and two more will open soon, and they are attracting the very people we should be attracting. The Pillars gained 500 new members in FY2026, its first year of trading, at around $30,000 per membership. (I know an investor, hence I have the data.) Why? Crucially, they operate under very different business models from ours: ours was formed 123 years ago; theirs were founded this century.

That is not a judgement on the Club, simply a fact. Founded in 1903, we are the oldest motoring club in Australia, at one of the finest addresses of any club in the nation. What has changed, and we have not changed with it, is the world outside our doors and how people in that world choose a club, what they expect for their subscription, and how many alternatives now compete for their loyalty.

What we have never had, as far as my research tells me, is a deliberate, properly funded vision, tied to a 5 to 10 year strategic plan, attached to a business plan. That business plan must include a carefully crafted membership model that subtly markets our Club beyond our walls in intelligent, sophisticated ways that elevate membership value: this is the Club you want to be a part of, must join, and only then can you enjoy the privileges of a RACA membership. Maybe we had such a plan and funding initially, but certainly not this century.

Winning members (buyers) is not a mystery. It is a discipline, and it is the one I have practised for more than thirty years.

What I bring to the Board table

More than thirty years of building and running businesses. I am a founder and an operator. I have started businesses, grown them and turned struggling ones around for clients. I know what it costs to execute a plan, not just write one, and I know the difference between spending money and investing it.

Strategic marketing, a skill this Board has never had. In more than 120 years, the RACA has never had a strategic marketing practitioner on its Board. Probably not on staff either. I do not mean advertising or gimmicks: that’s the last thing we want. I mean the disciplined work of understanding, inside out, the fundamentals for success: what our brand is and where it sits in the market; our value proposition; who our competitors are; what our Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) or points of difference (PODs) are; who and where our customers are, current and future, and what they want from a private members’ club; why they would choose ours, or, more importantly, why they wouldn’t, and what we must offer to earn them.

I also know who we should be partnering with in B2B relationships, an essential marketing strategy for a club like ours, in which you leverage what your partner brings to the table and understand what they expect in return.

Every organisation that has reversed a decline like ours has done this work first. We have never done it properly, never understood how to apply what it reveals, and never had an experienced Head of Marketing (HoM) to lead a small but fit-for-purpose team. I know what we need from that role, how to find them and what their brief should be. Importantly, I know they cannot be effective without the requisite, enabling budget.

Turnarounds, property and asset optimisation. From 1986 to 2020, I was deeply immersed in property, working with clients such as CommBank, Lendlease, Mirvac, Charter Hall, Frasers, Multiplex, Mulpha and Stamford, as well as investor groups such as Investec and EG Funds. My job was to analyse the product in relation to who the market was and where it was, and to create the materials and environment needed to achieve sales within the required timeframe: everything from branding to exhibitions, interior design and campaigns across various media platforms. Sometimes they came to my company because they had gone elsewhere first and sales had failed, stalled or both.

Branding (creating, positioning, valuing and managing a brand); marketing, developing merchandise and loyalty programmes; working with councils, heritage experts, government departments, master planners, architects, legal and financial teams; and reporting to CEOs and boards: all of this is second nature to me.

I developed a new string to my bow, asset optimisation: how to apportion potential and develop revenue streams based on a property’s location and characteristics, market gaps and trending demand. I worked with developers and investors on best use, how to win local and state government approvals, and on whose door to knock on for specialist advice or alternative pathways such as State Significant Development proposals. Tenders, government pitches, information memoranda, property analysis: all grist to the mill.

I believe I would be the only candidate bringing such an unusual suite of experience to the Gordian knot of turning our Club around and maximising its potential, without selling it.

Recently, I have been immersed in the agricultural sector, building national security projects that will improve outcomes for our producers. It’s work I love.

A member’s stake, not a consultant’s. I am not standing so I can add ‘RACA Board Director’ to my LinkedIn page or CV. My motivations are quite otherwise. Motoring is in my blood, as is country Australia. I am proud that my family has, in small ways, served both the British and Australian flags and contributed to our nation since its early days.

I want to save our Club. I don’t rely on what I am told. I rely on evidence and arithmetic. Every quarter, our declining membership numbers tell us the facts and they are not getting better. We need calculated decisions, based on rigorous business cases for every corner of the RACA, that serve our Club’s interests.

The vision: a Club Like No Other

No other club in this country can claim what we can. The oldest motoring club in Australia. A heritage home on Macquarie Street. A motoring story woven through the nation’s history, with reciprocal doors open around the world.

That is not nostalgia, it is a competitive position no one can copy or buy. Our task is to build a modern membership experience around it that is genuinely compelling to the people who should be joining us, at every stage of life, and to market it properly.

What I would like to see…

89 Macquarie Street, dressed to kill. Pressure-cleaned outside. Flags around the rooftop representing every country where we have an affiliate club, which would seriously catch the attention of every motorist on the Cahill Expressway or arrival at Circular Quay, raising our profile, with the Australian flag flying solo atop the Lift House and RACA flags flying on all four corners of the roof. Let’s install Bruce Marich’s great idea of signage on the northern roof fascia, to spell it out proudly:

‘Royal Automobile Club of Australia’

I would like to see every room active, used and enjoyed; every window alight at night, showing the world who, where and what we are.

A busy, vibrant Members’ Bar. Serving breakfast to Club guests staying overnight, morning tea, a glamorous High Tea in the afternoons, and a delicious, quick and affordable brasserie-style meal at lunch or dinner. Never, ever empty, with its long bar the centrepiece, a hub of activity and conviviality.

RACA livery. A doorman in full English-style regalia as I walk up the carpet from the footpath to the front doors. Inside, staff smartly attired in a truly distinctive RACA uniform, redolent of clubby climes, but very cool, and half the reason we attract new members who are bored with black and white. Presentation is the first principle. As I used to tell my clients: ‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression.’

Asset optimisation across all levels. Following consultation and collaborative agreement among the various interest groups and cohorts within the Club, and then approval by the membership as a whole, I would develop what my asset optimisation experience tells me would be a highly successful restructure of how we use our beautiful interior spaces: reviving those that have been forgotten, and delivering a club that would set the competition back on its collective heels.

Every component would require a quantifiable business case, with input from experts in heritage, hospitality and legislation, tied to tier-one tranche funding. No whims, no bright ideas, no captain’s calls or pet projects. Staged and rolled out over a 10-year programme.

A complete restructure of our membership categories, starting with a new ‘Social’ membership at around $250 per annum. It would carry no minimum spend, with restricted privileges and no access beyond the Members Bar unless invited to a special event. Its purpose is to act as a ‘teaser’, a ‘lure’, giving them a taste, but not the full meal. It would immediately boost the bottom line and create a platform I believe would grow fast. But it requires execution, which brings me to an important ‘what I would do’ item…

Hire a Head of Marketing to develop our marketing strategy and build a business case for funding it. I have already created the organisation chart and written the job description (minimum 12 years’ very specific experience). The salary package would include short-term incentives, a KPI-based bonus structure and additional executive ‘soft’ benefits. It is a fully accountable, performance-driven team: if they excel, they benefit, and so does the Club. That first hire is critical. Everything depends on that person, a role the Club, somewhat extraordinarily, has never had.

Ideas are not enough: here is the framework behind them

A vision only counts if it survives contact with reality. Mine comes with the support structure to make it happen:

A staged strategy, not a single bet. A clear long-term destination, mapped out in a 2-, 5- and 10-year business plan and broken into stages that start earning as each is completed, each with a professionally managed timeline, a business case and a contingency plan. Nothing is wagered on one throw.

Backing secured before we commit. Tier-one partners and funding lined up in advance, so each stage is resourced before it begins rather than paid for out of the Club’s reserves. I firmly believe we can achieve this: Westpac has offered such backing before, but the board and executive of the day fell short. It is possible.

A business case for every stage and every component. Research-backed, data-driven and presented to members. If a proposal cannot survive a business case, it should not survive at all.

Investment in execution. Strategies fail in the doing, not the writing. That means resourcing the Club properly to deliver: the right people, in the right structure, accountable for the right results.

Leadership. Good leaders are not risk-averse; they embrace calculated risk, because avoiding it guarantees stagnation. Organisations reflect their leadership. It is that simple.

What I will protect

Growth is not a threat to the Club you joined. It is what protects it.

Our heritage, character and traditions. They are not on the table, they are the asset. You do not modernise a club by sanding off the very thing that makes it worth joining.

Members’ pockets. Growth relieves the pressure on members. More members sharing the cost is the only durable alternative to asking fewer and fewer of us to pay more and more.

Your right to see the case first. Members see the case before major change or expenditure happens. You are entitled to the reasoning, the numbers and the risks, in plain language, in advance. Where the cost or change is substantial, membership approval should, under ethical governance of a private club, be sought.

Motoring as our core raison d’être. We are Australia’s first motoring club. Motoring is in my blood on both sides of my family. David Berthon has made a consistent effort to reignite motoring’s profile over the last couple of years, with his excellent columns that are educative, interesting and enjoyable. Competing against the young-gun private clubs for members, all things motoring are a USP we barely use and should; done properly, it would make a real difference to our bottom line and to the experiences and benefits we can offer members.

Defence. At this particular moment in time, in Australia, servicemen and women must be dismayed, even distressed, by the many negative acts from many quarters that appear intent on diminishing or diluting what it means to serve, even to pay the ultimate price. I will protect that part of our membership, honour them, and do my utmost to build their ranks among us.

The Australian Pioneers Club (APC). Contrary to rumour, I have no wish to see the APC depart. Indeed, my ancestor Henry Colden Antill’s portrait is part of the APC collection and hangs on the walls of our Club. History and heritage are very, very important to me. Further, the APC have been loyal contributors to the RACA, for which we say ‘thank you’.

What I won’t compromise on

One of the biggest threats to our Club is its own Constitution. With few exceptions, RACA boards have made decisions that have materially affected the Club, and they have been able to, because our board’s power is almost unlimited. It can act to an extraordinary degree without oversight and without seeking members’ permission. We must remember that every dollar our board spends is OPM: Other People’s Money. Ours, in fact. As we have seen, this has led to unintended consequences, none of them good.

Selling our heritage floor space. The current board is considering this. There are hurdles to overcome, and the process of achieving registration to sell requires expenditure, but it could return around $6.5 to $7.5 million (the market fluctuates). A nice quick fix, but a short-sighted one. The money would be consumed covering trading losses and bits and bobs, and we would have lost the potential of a strategy that could deliver significantly higher income and greater security through Club growth.

Lifting governance performance and members’ rights. I cannot recall a board, certainly not recently, that has had the benefit of directors with ‘real’ board experience. By that I do not mean sole traders, directors of family trusts, or members of the boards or committees of other clubs or community entities, but people who have served for any length of time on the board of an ASX-listed company.

We have no standing committees of the Board, not even an independent Audit & Risk Committee, and no board competency matrix (skills, experience, qualifications) to deliver the breadth and level of expertise commensurate with overseeing an entity whose sole asset could be worth in excess of $100 million.

I am seeking a mandate, via your vote, to overhaul our Constitution and deliver improved board performance and accountability. Boards are supposed to guide, steer, challenge and oversee how well the Executive carries out the board’s strategy: not a month-by-month affair, but a strategy with targets and accountability built in. Boards should not micromanage or make captain’s calls. They should be accountable to the membership, and the chair or president is one among equals, whose role is to guide rather than dictate.

This year, for example, voting for the board opens before the signed, audited financial report is available, the very information on which we should base our vote. And, for no apparent reason, the Moloney Board has introduced much longer election periods, which affects our executive team and, I would venture, imposes an election marathon on members. We could easily return to what it used to be, 25 to 30 days, instead of 40-plus. This year: almost seven weeks of voting. Ridiculous.

DACs, Dominant Assurance Contracts. This may have slipped under your radar. DACs are an American concept, used in charity fundraising. I can find no evidence of their use in Australia, which is not to say they don’t exist here. What concerns me is that, depending on how any ‘ROI’ is delivered to a participating member, they could breach our Constitution. Please read my research on DACs in the Leadership chapter: I believe this matter requires deeper investigation and should be brought to the members for a vote. At the last Town Hall, I asked David Moloney whether he intended to seek member approval before going down this path. He said ‘no’.

The ask

I am asking for your trust, for a mandate to bring professional business skills, including property-related insights, exceptional networks and marketing expertise, to the work of rebuilding our Club.

We were once one of the most sought-after memberships in Australia. With the right skills at the table and the right decisions made in the right order, we can be again.