The 59-year-old managing director of Cheltenham Racecourse has been at the Jockey Club-owned venue for the past 30 years and is seen as the driving force behind the famous National Hunt Festival, one of Britain's premier sporting events
My earliest ambition was to be a jockey… from the age of seven until I was about six foot. My passion influenced my education.
I was mad keen on horse racing and chose the university with the most racecourses near it, which was York, and the subject that I thought would least get in the way of my horse racing ambitions, which was politics.
I have used my politics training a great deal in business. Everybody thinks that they have the answer to everything. Pressure-group politics – that's what my life is.
I started out at Kempton Park and Sandown Park. When I came to Cheltenham, I was fascinated with how far this place could go. I kept the first balance sheet I had in 1980 – it was a profitable organisation. All it needed was to pump in volume.
Now it's about maintaining that position and growing where we can. It's a mature business but on some race days we're operating well under capacity so there's still a massive gap in terms of growing the business.
We had a clear vision that if we were to get a big piece in the middle of our [Cheltenham] jigsaw all the other pieces would work even better. Our big investment was [conference and events centre] The Centaur, which cost £20m. It really pushed out the rest of the place.
I'm trying to raise £40m for our next grandstand. The trick with The Centaur was to produce a business plan for our board which demonstrated that 50 per cent of the new revenues would come from horse racing and that has been exceeded. And 50 per cent from the conference and events side – we've easily achieved that
on the turnover.
The world has changed: margins are now tighter, there's less available cash and risk-taking is frowned upon.
We're dominant in the market because there isn't anything like this until you get to Newbury, which feels a long way away when you live in Gloucestershire. People's perception of motorways and how they divide the country is strange: south of the M4 sounds a million miles away.
It's extraordinary how the calendar is important to the conferences and events business. October and April are our best months. We'd like a 50-day October, April and May.
Leisure in the south-west is very strong. Tourism is strong. If you didn't read the newspapers and you went out into the streets, it feels OK.
Last year was our best and most profitable year ever for racing. This year will be not far off it. That has been an enormous achievement for our team.
Running a racecourse is like live theatre. Everyone knows their own parts and they deliver something. That's not just on race days. They have a way of coming through the doors, forgetting what's happening out there and getting on with it.
Making people part of your success is important: getting them onside, listening to what they want to get out of the relationship, whether they're a supplier or a client. Paying the bills fairly promptly also helps. Then when you're cornered you can ask for a favour.
Get out there and meet people so there's no gap between what you think they want and what they're telling you. Try to interpret that and turn it into something they couldn't have dreamt of. They can't describe what they don't know but when they see it they recognise that it fulfils that need.
I'm aware of the changing viewpoint that the modern customer has. You've got to use the timeline the customer gives you and not make demands upon them on how you would like to supply it.
Add value: people will gravitate towards best value. That's how to manage a business through tough times. Standards of delivery have to be top class. And dare I say it, add free car parking. There's nothing like a venue that's easy to find and free to park in.
I enjoy the outbox rather more than the inbox, which clutters my life and ties me unnecessarily to my desk.
I'd like to be one of those Laurence Olivier sort of characters with my own acting company taking me around the world.
I learn a little bit from the past. I learn from parallel experiences. I listen as much as I can to clever, more up-to-date colleagues.
