Newmarket Oral History: Mark Webster

Mark Webster (b. 1967) speaks to interviewer Virginia Macleod. Mark grew up around rural Campbelltown, where he developed a love of horses. After finishing school, he joined the Navy in 1986 as a trainee officer and served for 12 years, specialising in information technology and communications and rising to lieutenant commander. Wanting more time with his family, he left the Navy, settled on a small farm at Appin and bred a few horses as a hobby. He then shifted into commercial leadership roles, eventually becoming Managing Director of News Interactive. In 2007 Mark joined William Inglis & Son, chosen for his business expertise as much as his interest in horses. He quickly immersed himself in the thoroughbred industry and saw opportunities to modernise. Within six months Inglis introduced live online participation at auctions—still unique in Australia and New Zealand—and expanded customer-focused digital services, including online transactions, searchable horse information, and two online sales portals. As CEO, Mark led planning for Inglis’s relocation after government rezoning around Randwick. Warwick Farm was chosen for its space and accessibility, especially for international buyers. The project retained key elements of Newmarket’s heritage while expanding capacity with more acreage, stables, parking and a hotel designed to support both sales and year-round events. Mark and his family are keen quarter horse riders, though he no longer breeds racehorses to avoid conflicts of interest.

                 Today is Tuesday, the 22nd of August 2017 and I'm speaking with Mark Webster, managing director of William Inglis & Son.  We’re speaking for the Newmarket Stables Oral History Project.  My name is Virginia Macleod.

                 Mark, what year were you born?

                 I was born in 1967.

                 And where were you born?

                 I was born in Bankstown, just outside of Sydney and I grew up in the Sydney area, mainly in western Sydney, around Campbelltown.

                 Right.  It was quite rural in those days, I guess.

                 Yes, it was rural and it was during that time that I developed a passion for horses, not so much racing, but certainly riding horses, at the various riding schools out in south west Sydney.

                 Great.  And where did you go to school?

                 Well, I went to school in the Campbelltown area – the high school was called Airds High School, which was fairly new at the time because it was really an area that was under development, rapid growth, during my time there, in sort of the mid-‘70s.

                 And what were your parents doing –what were their work?

                 My father had his own business.  Initially, he worked in the hospital system, and then he started his own business which was, believe it or not, a carpet cleaning business, and my mother has worked in pharmacies for most of her life.

                 And did you have brothers and sisters?

                 Yes, three brothers.  I'm the second eldest, and probably the one who had the deepest love of horses but we all played football together growing up at school, and on weekends and, yeah, had a most enjoyable childhood.

                 And when you left school, did you know what you wanted to do?

                 Well, look, when I left school I joined the navy.  So in Year 12 at school I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do, and a couple of friends of mine told me about the Defence Academy in Canberra that was opening up in 1986, the following year, and so I travelled with them on a train into the city, met the recruiters and ended up being talked into joining the Defence Academy as a naval officer in training, and ended up then spending twelve years in the navy, serving at sea as a navigator and as a warfare officer, and left the navy at the age of twenty nine when I was a lieutenant commander.

                 Right.  So you got all your training through the Defence Force then?

                 Yes.  Well, my initial training.  So the navy put me through university, the University of New South Wales, which operated the college in Canberra, the Defence Academy College, and so all the academics from UNSW came to Canberra for that purpose.  So three years, completing my bachelor of arts degree, and at the same time undertaking training to be an office in the navy – it was all run in conjunction – and at the end of the three years I graduated, and headed out to sea and served on a number of different warships, over that remaining nine years in uniform.

                 And what did you study when you said it was arts – did you specialise?

                 Yes.  Well, look, we had to do a whole range of things but I majored in history, and politics, and to satisfy the navy, I also undertook oceanography and information science – information sciences they called it back then – and a range of other topics, but I certainly had a real passion for history and politics, back in those days.

                 So you had a good broad overview of what’s coming in life?

                 Yes.

                 And did you see active service in the navy, in warfare, or were you mainly doing general …?

                 I spent a lot of time at sea on warships, so I undertook a number of tours, up into the South Pacific, and southeast Asian area.  During my time I didn’t really fire any shots, in aggression during a war, but certainly after the initial Kuwait War we were sent to the Red Sea, and we patrolled over there.  So we were probably as close as you'd get to warfare but not engaged in it.  So our role was undertaking some boarding operations and anti-piracy activity, in that part of the world, the Red Sea, for a few months in the early ‘90s.

                 So you saw quite a bit of the world, with the navy?

                 Yes, I did.  I spent time over in Hawaii, through most countries in Asia.  North Africa, we sailed up to Egypt and Greece.  Yeah, lots of interesting and exotic places.

                 And then what prompted you to leave the navy?

                 Look, I left the navy because I started having a family.  I was married then and still am married to, Natasha Webster.  So we met at school when we were seventeen, and Natasha and I have been together all the way through the naval training at the Academy, and all of my time in service but, it was in 1997 that I left the navy and by then I had a three year old daughter, Jacinta, and I was finding that I was spending a lot of time away.  In her first three years of life, I was home for five months in three years, and it was just becoming very difficult.  So as much as I enjoyed my time at ships - and I served in Australian ships, I served on an American aircraft carrier, I spent time on submarines - I enjoyed all of that, I decided to put my family first, and leave and join the business community. And that allowed us then to finish off the family and have two more children, which I wouldn’t have done if I'd stayed in the navy because, it’s very, very difficult when you're away nine months of the year to raise a family, and it’s really not fair on your partner.

                 And your wife wasn’t able really to come with you at all, I guess.

                 No.  Well, we were on warships, you know, travelling around.  So they were all male warships, you know, and we jammed into very tight spaces, and we’d head off to sea for long periods of time.  We’d pull into various ports to refuel and replenish, in general, food and other essentials, but most of the time we weren't there for leisure, we were there to do business.  I think there was one occasion, when we were away over the Christmas/New Year period when Natasha was able to join.  So she was able to come on one occasion, and it was called a Christmas deployment, and the ship that I was on at the time, the HMAS Swan, which is a destroyer escort, we stopped in Hong Kong for Christmas and New Year.  And, anyway I asked the captain of the ship if it was okay to fly my partner at the time - my girlfriend it was, actually – to Hong Kong for a couple of days while we were tied up at port.  He agreed, so I flew Natasha up - I think this was in 1989 – and I proposed to her on Christmas Day, in Hong Kong.  So that was really the only time, and she didn’t quite know what she was in for after that.

                 And did you leave the navy with a particular interest?  I mean obviously you had diverse experience in the navy and were there particular things that you were interested in, or that you wanted to pursue once you left?

                 Well, yes.  I had a particular passion for technology and innovation and communication, and obviously the internet was evolving at that time.  So one of the things that I did in the navy, aside from specialise in warfare, is I then subspecialised in communications. And that area allowed me to learn a lot about the internet in general, how it was evolving.  You know, I'm proud to say just before I left the navy the ship that I was on, the Brisbane, which is a guided missile destroyer, we were the first ship in the Royal Australian Navy to, well, firstly to have a webpage, so when we were away family members could see where we were, and we’d put some pictures up without giving away any secrets.  We were the first ship in our navy to introduce a daily download of email, using a commercial satellite system - it was only once a day but it’s better than waiting six weeks for a letter in the mail.

                 Big improvement, yeah.

                 A big improvement and these are things that really changed the lives of people that I was working with.  And so I when I left the navy, it was certainly a goal of mine to find an area, or a role, where I could make a big contribution in the new digital space.

                 So where did you go?

                 Well, I actually started in a consultancy firm called Mercuri Urval in 1997 and it was more a HR: consulting company but in my eighteen months there it allowed me to see a whole range of different companies.  I was really applying, I guess, the people management or leadership skills that I'd learnt in the navy in this consulting role.  So my role was to go into different companies of the time like GEC, or Volvo, or Saab, companies like that, and undertake a management audit and identify people who weren't contributing, and try and put in place plans to deal with shortcomings in management, sometimes replace people.  So it wasn’t all nice work; some of it was a bit awkward at times but, it gave me a broader understanding of business, because I understood people and communication quite well from the navy but I didn’t know a lot about business, so it certainly helped round me off, I suppose.  And it was during that period that I saw there was potential to connect it all up through a new online employment service that News Corporation was starting up called CareerOne.com, and because I'd been working with people all of that time, and technology I joined News Corporation in 1999, as a sales manager, believe it or not, selling online recruitment services.  And then within twelve months of that, I was running that business, as a general manager; and then another year after that, I was asked by John Hartigan, the chairman of News Corp, to take over all of their internet businesses here in Australia.  So I was the managing director of News Interactive, running twenty different internet businesses, within three years of leaving the navy, so it was a lot of fun.

                 Yeah, sounds exciting.  Well, you were really in the right place at the right time, weren't you, all the opening up of the internet and communication?

                 That's right.

                 I mean everybody was really expanding in that time.

                 It was all new.  So we were building a new website every month.  So news.com.au, Fox Sports Online, the Australian.com.au, the Daily Telegraph, just so many different websites, you know, carsguide.  I was on the board of realestate.com soon after that business started - it’s now a five billion dollar company – so, yeah, I had a lot of fun in those very early days and really enjoyed that and, you know, I've tried to apply a lot of what I learnt from there in my role here at Inglis.

                 And, yeah, tell me, so how did you come to Inglis?

                 Well, I was working at News Corp at the time, but in my spare time my wife and I had a passion for horses – I alluded to that earlier – and when I actually left the navy in 1997, I had this huge payout of $30 000 – it was just enormous, you know – tongue-in-cheek – and my wife convinced me to spend 27,000 of that on buying a share in a stallion called Nothing Like a Dame who had just won the Derby, VRC Derby and then we bought a young broodmare for $2000 and we started breeding horses at that time.

                 So where were you based?  I didn’t ask that.

                 Well, at this time we were living on a farm in Appin.  So we had some acreage out there, with my mother and father-in-law - so they owned a property out there in conjunction with Natasha – and we decided to move there so we could raise the kids around horses, because we both loved horses.  But since we were on the farm, we thought we should maybe breed a couple of racehorses because we’d always loved racing, probably, as much as riding horses and so we started breeding.  So to answer your question, my last couple of years – or during my time at News Corporation I should say – I was breeding racehorses, and selling them at auction.  And so, you know, I'd be wearing a suit and going to meetings with Lachlan or Rupert Murdoch one week, the next week I'd have on my jeans and boots, and I'd be here at the sales, selling horses, and really enjoying all of that.  So what happened then is that Inglis decided to recruit for a CEO, or a managing director, in early 2007. And I was actually talking to a head-hunter about another position.  He called me to do a reference check on another position for another person, and we got onto talking about horses, and he said to me, ‘Inglis are looking for a managing director’, did I know anyone and would I be interested and that’s really how it all evolved, just by chance.

                 A chance conversation.

                 And, yes, and I had seen that Inglis had advertised in The Australian newspaper but I never, ever thought that that would be a role, for me.  You know, I had a love of horses, but I thought that Inglis would want somebody who was a real specialist, in the breeding and racing of horses; I was a hobbyist.  But as it turned out, the family and the board at the time, had decided that they wanted somebody who was firstly a businessperson, and then secondly had an interest and love of horses, rather than the other way round.  So it actually suited me well because I know a lot more about racing now, but back then I was a bit of a novice, just enjoyed it.  Natasha and I had a couple of mares at home for breeding.  We were a long way from the big commercial breeders at the time that had hundreds of mares and the top stallions.  So we were just playing around, really, in the sand.

                 And how did you find out about breeding?  I mean did you ask around or you just sort of …?

                 Initially, yeah, my father-in-law had a real passion for breeding, Howard Blight(?) – still has - he’s with us, and he has a great love of thoroughbred bloodlines and horses in general.  And so he had a lot of books about breeding, the origins of the thoroughbred, and I would borrow his books and study up on it, and he obviously would share a lot of his knowledge.  And so that helped fast-track me to understand, more about the industry.  So he was very helpful and my wife, Natasha, had a good understanding of horses in general.  And then when I started in the role, I just had to learn very quickly as to how it was.  I think most people understood that I was not coming to Inglis as a thoroughbred specialist; I was coming here as a businessperson, to help drive the business.  Because it’s just like any other company: it has the same opportunities, but the same challenges that any company would have.  You’ve got a product, you’ve got services and you need to sell them; you’ve got customers you’ve got to look after them.  You’ve got accounting to do, and you’ve got to report to a board, and run the company, you know, with good governance principles in mind.  So, really, most companies are the same; we just have different products and services, and that’s how I looked at it.  But thankfully I had the passion for horses and that allowed me to catch up pretty quickly.

                 And it was an extra interest in the whole picture, I would have thought.

                 Yes.  It certainly made it more enjoyable – it still does – getting up in the morning.  You know, people sometimes struggle to get up early in the morning to go to work, but in my case, you know, the products and services we offer are very much in line with my passion, my interest, and it doesn’t feel like I'm coming to work when I come to work at Inglis.

                 And when you came, the company, obviously it was the first time they'd had a managing director who wasn’t part of the family.  So you came in and what did you see that you wanted to do, and how did you work towards that re your aims?

                 Yes.  Well, I was a bit of an outsider at the time, but I have to say the board and the family members made me feel very welcome first of all. That I was an important part of the business and they gave me enough rope, I guess, to make some decisions and set out some plans.  So after really assessing the business over the first few months, I then decided on a bit of an agenda that I put to the board.  In fact, I took the board down to Bowral for, a strategy planning session, over a long weekend, and tested a whole range of ideas on them to make some changes to the company, and, thankfully, most of those were agreed.  Some examples of those plans were that I thought that the company should develop a digital division and focus on innovation.

                 There was nothing at that point or very little?

                 No, very little at that point.  The company had a very basic website, like a little brochure website.  There was no ecommerce and you couldn’t buy anything through the website, you couldn’t sell anything, you couldn’t enter a horse in a sale through the website.  It was really just a static brochure, but that was typical, ten years ago when I joined the company in 2007; most companies had a pretty basic promotional website.  So I wanted to introduce ecommerce and transactional technology to the company.  I remember being interviewed in my first six months about some innovations and I declared that within two years Inglis would be the first company to introduce online bidding, during its auctions.  So when there’s a physical live auction on the grounds, we would have technology in place that allowed people to join in that auction and bid from anywhere in the world. And I said it would be within two years; six months later we introduced it and we were the first and we’re still the only auction house in Australia and New Zealand to have online bidding.  And that was nearly nine years ago we introduced that, and the others still don’t have it, and it’s a big part of what we do; about thirty per cent of the horses we sell, are sold to bidders online who aren't on the grounds at the time.

                 You mean the live auctions or also you’ve got the online monthly auctions?

                 Yeah, we now have monthly online only auctions, but I'm talking about back in 2008 or 9, is that when we had a physical auction here – so we’d have thousands of people on the grounds at Newmarket – we introduced a system that was monitoring the auction.  So we had cameras, and technology that were picking up what was happening in the sale ring, and people were preregistered and logged in with credit approved, bidding from anywhere in the world.  And I remember at that first year that we ran the auction, during the Easter yearling sale we had a client from Hong Kong buy a yearling, for $600,000 from Hong Kong and he wasn’t even on the ground and people said, ‘Oh, my goodness.  This is crazy.  I've never heard of such a thing.’  So they're the things we were doing back at that time.

                 And had he send someone to look at the yearling or he’d done that or remotely?

                 Yeah, he had had somebody look at it and give him an opinion, and then he took control.  And we don’t encourage anybody to buy a horse without it being inspected, and the Inglis staff offer their own services to look at horses and give a genuine opinion on a horse.  There’s a lot of veterinarians and professional agents that do that job as well, but what we find is that, there’s some wealthy clients that like the thrill and excitement of being at an auction, or bidding on their own and having control.  So rather than delegating authority to somebody to bid on their behalf, they like to see the horse on the camera, hear the auctioneer’s voice, see the bidding in the ring, and then bid online to join in and be part of all of that, and so it’s really satisfying a need that people have.  I mean people get a rush out of auctions, and they want to be part of it, so we were just trying to deliver on that.  Those auctions continue today, but we also have online only auctions now because, we don’t run physical auctions as often as we used to.  We still have a number of very big physical auctions but, the monthly type auctions, are now generally online and the horses stay with their owners.  They put up photos and videos and they auction them off, and we complete the transaction and then the horses are relocated to their new owners.  So that is something that is certainly growing in popularity, but when it comes to the bigger auctions, where we have young horses in particular, that are quite expensive, the preference is still for people to physically be here, and to see them.

                 So there’s the two strands.  It’s not that one will replace the other?

                 I don’t think one’ll replace the other; our goal is to make sure they both work together well.  It really is about looking at what the customer needs.  So if you're an owner of a horse that you want to onsell because you can’t keep it for whatever reason – maybe you can’t afford the running costs of the horse, so you need to sell it – rather than waiting two months to the next physical auction, they can upload it, and move it on now, which is better for the horse and better for the owner, that they don’t have to hold it during a period, when it may not be wanted, or they may not be able to care for it properly during that period.  So I think it’s really meeting the demands of customers, and I think you see that now in other parts of everyday life; that some people will wait till the weekend to go shopping in the shopping mall in the city, and others on Monday night can’t wait till the weekend, so they’ll just shop online.

                 Yes.

                 So they’ll do what suits them based on their own moods, so we’re providing the choices.

                 And so that was quite a big change that you initiated fairly fast because you did it within six months.

                 Yes.

                 And what other things were you initially trying to work on?

                 Well, there were other changes in the digital area.  Without labouring too much, we introduced ecommerce so that clients could transact through our website, they could upload entries into our sales; rather than filling in a hard copy form, they could just go into the system, and upload horses.  We introduced the world’s first online repository for, veterinarian reports and x-rays reports and images.  So what used to be the case before we did this, is that a veterinarian would take forty two x-ray images of a horse’s joints in their legs, and make the film available in a room here on the grounds, and then vets would have to come here, physically sign in, and they'd go to the counter and every set of x-rays they'd have to get the forty-odd images and stick them up on a lightbox and look at them.  We decided that that was archaic and we developed a system whereby all of those images were just kept in an online repository - we got rid of film - and the we allow veterinarians from all over the world to log in and see them.  So what it meant is; that let’s say clients from South Africa, if they had a vet back in South Africa that they trusted, to form an opinion or give advice on buying a horse, they could use their own vet back in South Africa; they didn’t have to take advice from others that they perhaps didn’t have the confidence in.  So again, just a whole range of things to streamline the process of buying and selling horses.  We launched a business called Horsezone, which is a website for selling equestrian horses.  So Inglis is very well-known for selling thoroughbreds, but a lot of us in here have a passion for riding horses.  Personally, I love riding quarter horses, and I ride in western events; dress up like a cowboy on the weekends.  Other people in the office love dressage and show jumping.  Anyway, there are a lot of people here that just have a passion for horses, so we all got together, and launched hosezone.com.au , in those early years and it’s the leading website in Australia for the trading of horses of all kinds other than racehorses, so ponies for pony club or dressage horses, etcetera.

                 And that’s all online, I presume?

                 That’s all online in the digital division.  So we created this digital division - a lot of these new innovations sit in there.  We purchased a business called Bloodstock.com.au and we’ve further developed that and that’s now the leading portal for selling thoroughbreds online.  So we’ve got the leading portal for thoroughbreds, and another portal for selling riding or recreational horses, sport horses.

                 And did you have to develop special software yourselves for this, or did you use existing programs?

                 No, a combination.  Yeah, we’d use some base platforms, that were on the market and then we’d further develop them – that’s typically how we evolved things.  But there are a lot of things in the digital world.  If you go back to this strategy session in Bowral, one of the other things I proposed at the time, which sort of has led to you and I having this conversation today, is that perhaps we should consider relocating the Sydney business from Randwick to another location.  And so I proposed that in 2008 to the board with some trepidation, as to what the board might think, and what the family members might think about that, noting that Inglis had been operating here from Newmarket in Randwick since 1905.  Most people thought it was 1906 – it’s actually 1905 as some good historians have told us.  And so it was, you know, quite a controversial thing to propose.  And the board were open to the idea without agreeing to it immediately, but it took another twelve months of planning and research, and engaging some property consultants to work with us to really assess that opportunity, but within twelve months we had decided that we would acquire another property within the Sydney basin, to allow us to plan for a relocation.  We hadn't agreed on a timeline, but we had agreed that it would happen one day.  It was inevitable because the Randwick precinct was changing.  Back then it was announced that it was a priority education, health growth precinct and clearly we didn’t quite fit into that.  We’re not on the racecourse; we’re right next to the hospital and we’ve got a university between us and the racecourse.

                 When you say it was an education, health precinct, do you mean it had been zoned as such?

                 Well, the state government around that time in 2008/9 released a strategic plan for New South Wales, or for Sydney in general, and the Randwick area was designated as a growth precinct for education and health.  Now obviously it already has a significant hospital and university here, but as part of this strategic plan it was made very clear that that was the priority for this area.  And we were visited by council, Randwick Council officers, during that period, not because we alerted them to what we were thinking about, but by coincidence they came in during that twelve months of review to talk to us about that, and to understand what our plans were, because that plan had been set by state government - it was then up to local councils to interpret it, and develop their own plans.  And I think the other part of that plan is that the state government had set a housing target for the Randwick LGA – I think it was another 20 000 homes by the year 2031 or something along those lines.

                 The urban density plan.

                 Yeah.  So to address the needs of the hospital and the university, it was deemed that more dwellings needed to be created to accommodate that growth, and they were looking for places to deliver on that growth and, you know, they effectively said, ‘Are you staying here or are you leaving?’  So it all happened to be around the same time that we were contemplating the relocation, so it just seemed to be one of those things that made sense.  We’re conscious of the fact that not only do we have the university and the hospital, we’ve got three schools on our boundary, secondary and primary schools, and a preschool.  So, you know, a hundred-odd years ago it was us, and a number of other training stables, in the roads between us and the racetrack, and so over the years all of those stables have disappeared, and a hospital and a university have taken their place, and we’ve been disconnected from the racecourse, and access in and out for big horse trucks and other things had become more and more challenging.  So we could see the change had to occur but, our goal was to ensure that it was a smooth transition to a new location, and to leave Newmarket in good hands; they were our goals at the time.

                 And the decision to remain within the Sydney basin, was that fairly paramount?  Because I mean there are equestrian centres in more rural areas but you wanted it near the city?

                 Yes, because we’re not producing horses here, we’re marketing them. So we thought it was important to look at the needs of our customers, and buyers in particular like to be close to international airports.  About thirty per cent of what we sell through the Inglis sales here in Sydney are to international investors, and when they're making a long trip out from other parts of the world, the last thing they want to do is then spend another, you know, three, four hours driving up to the Hunter Valley or somewhere else like that.  So we thought it was still important to be close to the airport, and also reasonably close to the Sydney CBD.  So if they wanted to, clients could stay in the city in hotels, and drive out to the selling complex each day, or they could stay in our complex but still feel like they're part of a major city.

                 So we identified the Warwick Farm Racecourse, which is only twenty five minutes from Sydney International Airport, as the ideal location.  The turf club at the time, it was known as the Australian Jockey Club at the time and they changed their name, a few years subsequent to us entering an agreement with them. The AJC as it was at the time, I entered dialogue with them about whether they had any land that they would consider selling, and the deputy chairman at the time, John Cornish – this is in early 2009 – John Cornish indicated to me they did have land at Warwick Farm Racecourse that they owned freehold and they were thinking of selling and so that’s how we ended up acquiring twenty six acres from the AJC as it was at the time.

                 Perfect fit.

                 But that was in 2009, so the next challenge was to prepare Newmarket for sale, and to find a suitable custodian for the long term.  And it took about five years to go through the process of rezoning and adding value to the site, dealing with council and state government, and then to complete the sales process to Cbus superannuation.  So, you know, there were a lot of bidders on this site here at Newmarket - there were a lot of individuals and companies that wanted to acquire it - you know, it is a rare gem, a beautiful, beautiful piece of property, in a wonderful location.

                 How big is it exactly?

                 It’s about twelve acres of land. And we’ve always prided ourselves on the beautiful gardens and landscaping here, and the lovely fig trees that provide shade and atmosphere and the old Newmarket House or Hotel, the old barn.  So all of those things add character.  You know, the fabulous news is that Cbus, they actually weren't the leading bidder - there was an international party that was the leading bidder – but we chose Cbus, we chose to sell to Cbus for a whole range of reasons, but one of them was that we obviously thought they would look after the site and do a good job.  They were an Australian superannuation company and there are 700,000 everyday Australians who have their super with Cbus and, you know, they own Newmarket now and that makes me, and our board members, feel good about the sale.

                 And also they're preserving some of the elements that you mentioned, the hotel and the gardens, and the sales ring area is going to be a public access area, isn't it?

                 That's right, yeah.  And that’s what we were talking about - that was the other element - it wasn’t about taking the highest price.  And there were some internationals that could have bid on the property, that probably would have tried to demolish everything that they could have, but out of respect for this site we wanted to make sure that it was, as I said, with the right custodian.  And Cbus have been fantastic; they're wonderful people and obviously they represent the building and the tradespeople, plumbers and builders and carpenters, so they understand the value of property in general, but, yes, they’ve been fantastic.  So all of the mature trees will be staying, the old house or hotel – it was a hotel – the Newmarket Hotel will stay, the big barn down the back.  And they don’t have to keep the sale ring, but they're going to keep the sale ring structure, and turn it into a park, a children’s playground, and they’ll have a lot of interpretive activities, and amusements, and games and rides, and things for the children and using a lot of the original materials.  So we’re taking a lot of timber and bricks, and other materials from here out to our new facility, but Cbus are doing the same here; so they’ll be reusing some of those materials in what they do.  So it really is fantastic, that their approach to the site, is one consistent with what we would have liked to have seen, and I think it'll be a wonderful place for people to live in the future.

                 Very nice, very good.  And the reuse of material, was that a conscious recycling policy - I know that you're taking some things to Warwick Farm – or is it an element of taking heritage with you?  What was the thinking behind that?

                 Yes.  Well, it’s actually more expensive to reuse our materials than it is to just use new materials, but I'm a big believer in heritage, and I love aged material, whether it’s timber, or old brick pavers that have got some chips out of them or, you know, hoof prints.  So we are taking as much as we can without disturbing the heritage of this site, but as I said, it’s not about cost; it really is about when we go we want to take some of the soul of Newmarket with us out to the new facility.  So an example would be for the new stables that we’re building out there, we’re using new metal frames for each of the stables, because the stables that are here, the metal frames, have rusted a bit over the years, being so close to the ocean, so it doesn’t make sense to use that, but we’ve taken the timber out of here, and it will slot into the new frames that are coming in from Europe, so it'll look like it did here in some ways.  I mean the frames will look new but the timber is old.  It’s had horses kicking into it, leaning into it, biting on it, chewing on it, over a long, long time and that'll continue.  And I think that also helps our clients, the breeders and buyers and others who’ve been coming here for many decades, it helps them with the transition.  It’s a bit like an old pair of boots sometimes: you might change the heel or, you know, change the lining or do something but, it’s still the same comfortable old boot and so we want to achieve the same feeling out there, that we’ve shown a respect to this site, and to the new site as best we can.

                 And will you be naming the stables and things in the same way?  I mean will stables 1 be reconstructed at Warwick Farm as stables 1, or are they all being renamed?

                 Look, here we had stables 1 to 4 and it was a little bit confusing because we’ve not had a lot of land here, so the layout’s probably not as ideal as it could be.  So there’s some things from here that probably don’t suit out there, because we’d like a more simplistic layout of the stables out there.  But what I can say, is that we are taking a lot of the heritage from here in other ways to the new facility.  So an example would be the restaurant out in the hotel that we’re building.  Firstly, the hotel that we’re building is called the William Inglis Hotel.  It’s an MGallery by Sofitel branded hotel, run by the Accor Group on our behalf.  And our office is one floor of the hotel, so we’re there, right in the middle of it. But we are naming every room in that hotel after a champion that we’ve sold from here, and I think that’s really important.  So there’ll be a brass plaque on the front of every hotel room celebrating that horse, and as you go into the room there’ll actually be artwork that celebrates that horse.  We’re having the colours of each horse hand-painted, to be displayed in each room as well. So there’ll be a real sense of colour and uniqueness in every room that you go into in the hotel and the names of those champions, like Might and Power who won the Melbourne Cup, sold from here, will be carried on out there.  As well as right around the grounds we are building a barn there, which is similar in scale to the barn we have down there that was built a hundred and thirty years ago.  Here it’s affectionately known as ‘the big barn’ or ‘the big stable’ and so we will have another big barn out at Warwick Farm which will be great for sales but it'll host weddings and all sorts of other events.  It will have a real rustic feel to it and again all the stables in that barn will be built out of timber from here.  So we’re trying to carry the names through.  You know, the fig trees from here we have been able to propagate two saplings from the magnificent Morton Bay fig tree near the sale ring.

                 About eight years ago we started to propagate them, and they're a good four metres tall now, and so those two saplings will be planted out on the new site.  And if you look at the design of the new site, we’ve created two sculptures which the horses will parade underneath – we call them the white metallic fig trees – and so we’ve tried to carry through, the character of this place as much as possible in the architecture, and I think our clients will really appreciate that.  So we haven’t copied this; we’ve taken the bits and pieces we like, and we’ve tried to have a better layout, more simplistic layout, because we’ve got the chance.  When you’ve got a blank sheet of paper, you can get things right.

                 Start again, yeah.

                 Start again.

                 And also it’s going to be bigger in terms of the numbers of horses, isn't it?

                 More space, yes.  More space to do what we do, plus more stables.  So we’re going from twelve acres to twenty six acres of land, and we’re increasing the stabling, but we’ve just got a better layout and more space for the horses to be paraded.

                 And is it just flat land?

                 Pretty well flat, yeah.

                 On the river?

                 So one boundary of the property’s on the river, the other boundary is on the racecourse, so we are literally in the corner of the racecourse.  So our property runs along the home straight, so as the horses come round the bend at Warwick Farm Racecourse, we’re directly opposite that, and then down the home straight and at the far end we’ve got the Georges River, and on the other side we have Governor Macquarie Drive.  So it’s a lovely, lovely spot.  The river out there in Liverpool, Warwick Farm area, has probably been a bit neglected over the years, but the council, they say they turn their back on the river, but they're now turning around towards it and looking at how to take advantage of it.  There is a marina under development not far from our site, and there’s a boat club across the way, and so people are out water-skiing and sailing on the river now and Chipping Norton Lake, so I think it'll become more and more of a feature.  Although it’s not part of our initial development, we do want to build a jetty from our property and connect to the river, so that people who are based in the marina can come and visit us, and come and have lunch in the Newmarket Room Restaurant as part of our hotel.

                 And you're sharing the carparking space with the racecourse.  That’s’ the existing carpark, is it?

                 That's right.  One of the good things about a racecourse, Virginia, is that they have a lot of parking for race day patrons, so one of the things we incorporated into our contract with the Turf Club is that when we purchased the land there would be an easement created over the carpark, so we were able to share that.  So we go from two hundred carparking spots here at Newmarket, to nearly two thousand carparking spots.

                 Unimaginable, isn't it?

                 No, it’s very good.

                 It must be quite liberating, that whole sudden sense of space.  I mean, as you said, this place has lovely qualities, or history, but it’s quite constrained and now suddenly you’ve got heaps of space, particularly when the thing you're dealing in is horses.

                 That's right.

                 Will they have a lot more space or they all just will be in stables?

                 The horses will have a lot more space to move about. 

                 What, for parading?

                 Yeah, for parading.  When our sales are on, the horses have to parade, and, look, here at Randwick, there’s not a lot of space and so when the horses parade and you’ve got a lot of people here, it’s a challenge to keep people away from horses and to keep them safe.  One of the things out there is that we’ve been able to plan with workplace health and safety in mind.  You know, a hundred-odd years ago it probably wasn’t as important as it is today, but certainly in the new site, we’re separating vehicles from people, from horses, with the whole layout; separate walkways.  And, yeah, we have a ring road around the outside of the complex so vehicles don’t come onto the property; they have to go round the outside.  And there’s a perimeter fence for horses and so they can’t get out of those areas, and there’s separate walkways that are fenced for pedestrians.  So it’s a lot safer, and the horses will be able to parade and show themselves off, without stepping on top of people that are there for the sales, so I think everyone will enjoy that.

                 This will be the only horse selling facility in the world that has a hotel incorporated into the premises, and that allows guests that don’t want to travel in and out to Sydney each day, to stay in our own hotel and just, enjoy the whole experience without travelling.  We’ve got three bars in the hotel, a magnificent restaurant, a separate café, a pool on the roof, a day spa, a wellness centre; a lovely way to spend a week, relaxing in the hotel and buying a couple of horses and catching up with old friends.  And that’s what the horse sales really are about; it’s not just about coming in and buying horses and transacting.  Our clients love to catch up with their friends from different parts of the world or across Australia.  Sometimes, they team up and they buy a horse together, other times they just catch up and have a beer and talk about old times, or celebrate each other’s successes over the last year.  So we’re just facilitating that, to make sure that they have a good experience.  But, as I said, we will be the only horse-selling complex to offer that.  Probably the other point worth making is that we haven't built the new facility at Riverside just for horse sales.  We only sell horses about ten per cent of the year here in Randwick and it'll be the same out at Warwick Farm, so the other ninety per cent of the year we have to have other activities and events on the grounds, and with the hotel we can take advantage of all of the infrastructure that we’re putting in place, for a whole host of things.  So corporate events, seminars, we’re building the sale ring so there can be easily a ballroom for a big event.  It’s a theatre.  Our stables have been built so the front doors or the front walls of the stables can swing back ninety degrees, and then you have a three and a half by three and a half metre exhibition booth for an expo, so we can go from being a horse selling facility, to an exhibition centre, in about half an hour.

                 Very good.

                 No one else has done that.

                 With plenty of help.

                 Plenty of helpers.

                 All hands on deck definitely, yeah. 

                 So you just mentioned then that you weren't going to have any more sales per year.  Is that definite or is it something that you could suddenly have six sales a year, or that doesn’t work in a seasonal industry like horses?

                 Yes.  Well, based on the current production rate of horses - you know, there’s about fifteen thousand foals born a year here in Australia – unless that changes dramatically, there won't be a need for a lot of new sales.  The other consideration is that, when you have buyers flying in from around the world or interstate, they’ll only make that journey to Australia so many times per year.  So it’s our preference to grow each sale in number, rather than have more sales.  So we don’t want them having to fly out to Australia five times during the year.  It’s not good for them and it’s not good for us cost-wise to do it that way, so it’s better to grow each sale individually, so while they're here they've got more horses to buy from.  So an example would be the Classic sale which is held in February each year.  Typically, here at Newmarket we’ve not had any more than six hundred for the Classic sales because that’s the number of stables we have.  We have eight hundred and thirty stables out at Riverside, and next year they’ll all be full, and that sale will grow; it'll have a second session to it, and it grows by thirty per cent in year on.  So for us, it’s better to do it that way, than to try and put on another sale at a separate time of year and try and get everyone to fly back for it.  Plus the hotel, you know, it needs periods where it’s got a clear schedule to attract events, and we do want to grow the events and conferencing side of the hotel business, and so, in some ways it’s better to get our sales done and dusted in a certain window and then it frees up the hotel for - - -

                 So many months of the year.

                 - - - so many months so it can get on with all the other business, including weddings and conferences and things like that.

                 And did you have a lot of negotiation with Liverpool Council about developing the site?  Was that complex?

                 A lot, yes, a lot.  I mean we’ve been talking to Liverpool Council since 2009.  In fact, the mayor, Mayor Wendy Waller, she was the mayor back when we started this and she stood down, but she’s now back in charge and she’s the mayor again and it’s great to have her on board.  The mayor who served in between was a mayor - Ned Mannoun, he was a Liberal, and Wendy Waller’s Labor, but regardless of the politics both mayors, Liverpool Council in general, I should say, have been very welcoming and very supportive of all of our ventures.  They see what we do as being world-class and they see our facility as being very much needed as an amenity, for the local area.  Liverpool is not far from where I grew up in the Campbelltown area, so I've been well aware of Liverpool and Campbelltown and southwest Sydney and being called a ‘westie’ growing up, and all of that rubbish that goes on, but certainly that part of Sydney needs investment, it needs to be appreciated, and the people out there need quality facilities; they don’t want to run their lives in second-rate facilities, and they shouldn’t.  And so we’re delivering what we think will be world-class and facilities that are at least on par – you know, restaurants and cafés that you get in the city, and the benefit is the locals won't have to drive all the way into the city, when they want a nice meal, or they want to catch up for a coffee.  Or if they want to have a wedding, they don’t necessarily have to go to the Southern Highlands for a wedding; they could have that whole rural experience, in their own backyard, and use our hotel, and all the amenities that we have there.  So that’s what we’re trying to cater for.

                 Just coming back to the original strategy meeting you had in 2009, you’ve talked about quite a lot of what’s come out of that, but were there any other areas of strategy or plans that you'd hoped to realise that you’ve achieved in that time?

                 Look, as a team I think we’ve achieved in a couple of other areas, but I guess the other key area on that day that we discussed was contemporising the brand of the company, and all of our communications and, you know, probably making the company more customer-friendly.  The company when I took over had wonderful credentials, being very professional, but a few people would have said back at the time it was a bit conservative, and traditional, and maybe not as warm as it could be and the brand felt a bit outdated.  And so, you know, without being critical of it, we set about trying to further enhance the brand, to not only being something that was seen as, I guess, traditional and conservative, and playing too much on the history, and we focused on why we’re still relevant today, and that was about innovation and a high level of customer service.  And things that we did back then, we put in place key account management strategies, and we changed the way that we dealt with our customers.  So examples would be back then, when our bloodstock staff were going out into the field to meet with clients, you know, different people would go and see different clients at each time, and very much our guys in the field were going out and assessing horses and they were in some ways a little bit like a judge: ‘Yes, you can come to our sale.’ or ‘No, you can’t come to our sale.’  And it’s just changing the way we interacted with our clients, so it was more a discussion about what sales best suited our clients, and not being so bossy about it, and being more open, and having a more friendly way of interacting with our clients.  And the innovative approach to everything that we were doing was important as well, so rather than necessarily new ideas, shutting them down as some people were doing at the time and saying, ‘We’ve always done it that way’, it’s changing the culture to being more open to ideas, either internally or from external sources. 

                 So the company had a lot of great attributes, but I suppose some people thought it was a little bit stuck in a time warp and needed to be modernised and contemporised.  And there are a number of good people in the company who felt the same, that it should be, and so we just worked together to go down that path. So a number of new positions were created in the company that are very customer-orientated and innovation-focused. And last year we had our record year for the sale of yearlings and set a new Australasian record.  So we’ve got some stiff competition, locally.  Our opposition on the Gold Coast is owned by a billionaire, and our opposition in New Zealand’s owned by a billionaire.  So there are no billionaires in our company, but we’re up against two billionaires who’ve got a lot of money to spend and a lot of influence.  So I'm very proud to say that despite all of that, and the help that they get from government – we don’t get any financial help from government - we’ve been able to hold our head above water.  And in fact, as I said, last year set a new Australasian record for yearling sales, and that’s only come about by the team that I've been working with, you know, embracing change, embracing innovation, and working together, very much for the benefit of the customer, not for us or for ourselves; it’s been about getting the right outcome for all of the customers, and so I'm very proud of the people, that they’ve helped achieve that, over the last ten years.

                 And are you still riding in all this?

                 Yes.  I'm riding probably more now than I did in my younger years because when I was younger I had the passion for riding, but I didn’t have my own horse when I grew up in Campbelltown.  My family, as I indicated earlier, were very much a blue-collar family; we didn’t have a farm or anything.  Anyhow, my wife and I now live on fifty-odd acres in Cobbitty, and we’ve got twelve quarter horses at home that we compete on.  Yeah, so I like competing.  I've got two horses that I like to compete on myself, and my wife and two daughters both compete.  In fact, my daughter last year represented Australia at the World Quarter Horse Championships in Oklahoma.  I've got a horse, I just purchased in the last month, in training in Texas, and my goal is for all this 2018 is to be competing on her in the World Quarter Horse Championships, if we can qualify between now and then.  So even though I'm one month away from being fifty, I still love being around horses, and I love riding them, and they're a big part of our way of life.

                 And you're not breeding horses anymore?

                 Don’t breed racehorses.  So when I joined Inglis, one of the things I had to do to avoid a conflict of interest is stop breeding racehorses.  So at Inglis, none of the employees, or directors, are allowed to breed horses and sell against our clients.  So our integrity is really important.  All of our competitors are different to that: some of them are the biggest sellers at their own auctions; we have a very different view to that.  So when anyone comes to an auction here and they're bidding on a horse, and we’ve given them advice that it’s a nice horse or whatever, that they know no one here has any interest in the horse, and our advice is totally independent.  So I had to give up the breeding of racehorses, but Natasha and I do breed quarter horses.  So we’ve got two quarter horse mares at home, and we produce two foals a year, and we’re enjoying playing around with them as much as we are our older quarter horses.  So we’ve just replaced that love of breeding horses, by swapping out the thoroughbreds and adding in the quarter horses.

                 So what do you do in the quarter horse competition?

                 Right, so it’s mainly western-related events.  So we have events - one of them’s called trail, but it’s not trail riding as some people might think. Trail is an obstacle course: so basically you’ve got to take your horse out on an obstacle course and complete the pattern as set by the judge and it involves manoeuvring the horse around through gates, over bridges, through logs, side passing, backing, cantering over logs, whatever the obstacles are and you’ve got to do them correctly in the right order, and you get scored based on that.  So in some ways it’s a class that’s been introduced to assess like a typical ranch horse.  So when a horse is on a ranch and they’ve got to go out and do chores – they’ve got to open gates, they’ve got to close gates, they’ve got to go over bridges, they’ve got to go through water, they’ve got to round up cattle.  This is a class that was introduced fifty-odd years ago to assess the suitability of a quarter horse for doing ranch-related work.  So there are a number of classes like that where there’s patterns.  Reining is another class, that I've done - horsemanship, which is a bit like doing dressage, where you go out into the arena on your own, and do a pattern but it’s in cowboy mode, rather than in jodhpurs.  So they're the sort of events that I like to do.

                 And it was introduced from America here?

                 Yes, it’s very much an American sport.

                 How long has it been going in Australia?

                 Well, it’s been going here since the ‘60s - it was introduced in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales.  The first quarter horses were brought out to Australia, and a couple of stallions were brought out here, and I think Milton Park you might know down there, was really the home base for those first quarter horse stallions – I think the property back then was called King Ranch – and that was really the start of it.  And I guess over the last nearly fifty years it’s really blossomed, and it’s becoming a more significant sport here.  It hasn’t caught up to dressage, or show jumping yet, but for people who like riding their horses around their farm, and not just in the show pen, but actually having a useable horse that can do a whole host of things.  This is really the sort of sport that they should be doing and that’s why we like it.  It’s not dressing up and going off to do dressage, it’s actually pulling your quarter horse out, and showing them off in your jeans, but just showing how well you connect with that horse.  And the key with the events that we do, it’s not about pulling on their head or pulling them around, it’s really just about showing the minimal amount of contact on the bit, with the reins.  So they're on a very loose rein, and it’s all about very small movements of your hands and your legs, to make a horse perform a routine, and it’s quite a challenge to make it look like you're doing nothing, and get the horse to perform.  So that’s what I like doing.

                 So you’ve covered quite a lot of ground in the last ten years since you came here and introduced quite a lot of changes and helped the company grow and readapt and you're moving to a new site.  So looking back over all that, what do you feel that’s your greatest achievement out of that or is it the whole picture?

                 Look, when I came into the role, I had a sense it was my responsibility to try and set the company up for another hundred years or so, and so the thinking has all been around, ‘How can I help this very successful company to set itself up to be successful for another hundred-odd years?’ And, you know, we’ve been able to do that; we’ve extracted some great value out of the property assets that we have.  We’ve reinvested in a new facility which is going to be truly world-class and we’ve extended the services the company offers into hospitality; it’s a new revenue stream, which will help really strengthen the core bloodstock business.  And I've helped to try and deal with the challenges of digital by actually, being a leader in digital, rather than trying to hide from it.  We’ve embraced it, and made it a key part of what we do, rather than let somebody else trying to eat our lunch; we’ve come in and built our own digital services.  Yes, okay, we eat some of our own traditional lunch from time to time but at least we’re eating it, not somebody else.  So I guess I feel, you know, satisfied that at some point when I do step down as the CEO that hopefully we are set up for the long haul, that we’re a leader in the digital space, and we’ve been able to recycle capital, and set up a new headquarters and a new facility that will serve the industry, not just Inglis but the industry, for another hundred years or so.

                 It sounds really good.  Thank you very much, Mark.

                 Yeah, thank you.

                 It’s been a really interesting afternoon.  Thanks for telling me all that.

                 Yeah, you're welcome and thanks for your interest.