SANAN PUSHING FOR BREEDERS’ CUP PLAN
Satish Sanan has never been afraid to speak his mind, whether he’s at a Thoroughbred auction, the racetrack or a corporate boardroom. Still a relative newcomer to this industry (he and wife Anne bought their first yearlings at Keeneland in 1997 for his family’s Padua Stables), Sanan has been a proponent of greater transparency and disclosure in many facets of racing and breeding.
A native of India who was educated in England and is now a U.S. citizen and successful businessman, Sanan was first asked to join the Breeders’ Cup board in 2003. He was elected to the 13-member board of directors when the organization restructured its governance in January 2006. “I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to the Breeders’ Cup,” Sanan told the Paulick Report, “but I’ve seen a lot of progress lately.”
If there is progress in the future, Sanan might deserve a large share of the credit. He is head of a strategic planning committee that’s hired a world-class consulting firm to examine virtually every aspect of the Breeders’ Cup and present a strategic plan to the board of directors in July. The committee was his idea, after he criticized the organization for not having a five- or 10-year strategic plan, instead operating tactically on a year-to-year basis and making decisions on what Sanan called “knee jerk reactions” to events.
But while Sanan has been critical of some aspects of the Breeders’ Cup, he strenuously objected to the tone and content of an editorial written by owner-breeder Peter Blum that appeared in the Thoroughbred Times of Jan. 10, 2009, and was referenced here in the Paulick Report. Sanan wrote a rebuttal to Blum that was published in the Jan. 24 edition of the Thoroughbred Times, citing a series of changes and improvements to the Breeders’ Cup since the new board was elected three years ago. (Neither Thoroughbred Times commentary is available online.)
“I felt the (Blum) article was all negative and non-factual,” Sanan told the Paulick Report. “He is objecting to a number of things, but doesn’t back it up with anything, and I tried to go through it step by step and back it up with a lot of data.”
Sanan said there are some who will criticize “whatever the Breeders’ Cup board and its management do. The perception is that it’s still the ‘old guard,’” he added, “that (board chairman) Bill Farish runs it and his dad (William S. Farish of Lane’s End) tells him what to do. But the reality is a lot of people on that board are pretty damned vocal and will say what they want to say. From operations to communications to financial management to the whole structure, I tell you it is so much better than it was five years ago.”
The younger Farish and chief executive officer Greg Avioli worked closely with Sanan in the early stages of the strategic planning process, beginning in August and September. “We asked for volunteers (among the 48 individuals on the Breeders’ Cup board of members and trustees) and got a very positive response, with more than 15 committee members,” Sanan said.
During a personal trip to London, Sanan scheduled an appointment with Spectrum Value Partners, a global consulting firm that was referred to him by Malcolm Glazer, owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the National Football League and majority owner of the English Premier League football giant Manchester United. Spectrum Value Partners offers strategic advice to a number of telecom and media clients worldwide, and also has a roster of sports clients, including several teams in the English Premier League. They also have had some horse racing clients, according to Sanan, including At the Races television, the Melbourne Cup and Victoria Cup. Click here to learn more about some of the sports consulting done by Spectrum Value Partners.
“We needed a firm that can take a 500,000-mile view and help us put together a five-year plan,” Sanan said. “The Breeders’ Cup needs to put a plan in place, like NASCAR did 10 years ago, something that says, ‘Here is where we want to be in five years, or 10 years.’
“They did a terrific presentation to the board, and the process has started,” Sanan said.
The first step was development of a lengthy questionnaire distributed to the 48 Breeders’ Cup members and trustees. The nearly 70 questions cover considerable ground, including sections on governance, nominations, perceptions about the Breeders’ Cup, comparisons with other sporting events, international issues, external challenges, and expectations about the future. The consulting team from Spectrum Value Partners, led by partner William Field and assisted by Janice Hughes, Richard Mooney and Sam Evans, will then conduct one-on-one interviews with roughly 50 major industry stakeholders from around the world. It will also gather information from racetracks and horseplayers, Sanan said.
In the midst of this, a two-day retreat for the strategic planning committee will be held in South Florida in February.
“One of the things I’ve been critical of is that we rely on one-day of revenue (now two days) with the championship races and on stallion and foal nominations,” Sanan said. “Breeders’ Cup needs to find alternative forms of revenue and not be dependent on foal nominations from breeders, but to somehow do more for breeders. Should we consider multiple cities for the event, like the World Cup does in soccer? We are in the baking stage, but I believe something good is going to come out of this.
“Whether or not it will be implemented remains to be seen.”
Putting together strategic plans is something Sanan has done in all of his businesses. “If you can put together a five-year plan and execute it, it’s very helpful,” he said. “You may have to adapt the plan each year, tweak it a little because of external events, but we’ve always executed these plans in my businesses. For some reason, a lot of people don’t do it in this (the Thoroughbred) industry.
“There is a big difference between running a business and building a business,” he added. “It’s in building and growing and transforming that you learn a great deal. The Breeders’ Cup is a great entity with a good brand name. We should be able to generate a couple hundred million dollars worth of revenue. This can be transformed into a huge, international, highly successful organization. Whether we can get there or not, I don’t know. But as part of the process, I’m going to give it a go.”
Copyright © 2009, The Paulick Report
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Tags: at the races, Bill Farish, Breeders' Cup, Breeders' Cup board of directors, Breeders' Cup World Championships, english premier league, Greg Avioli, Horse Racing, malcolm glazer, manchester united, melbourne cup, nascar, padua stables, Paulick Report, peter blum, Ray Paulick, satish sanan, spectrum value partners, tampa bay buccaneers, Will Farish, William S. Farish
January 23rd, 2009 at 7:23 am
A plan - any plan for any reason, beats the whim of random chance.
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:17 am
This is all encouraging news and the kind of article that explains why I make your report my first visit every morning. But I don’t understand why BC hasn’t communicated this information to us nominators. Is it findable on the BC’s own web site somewhere? If it is i can’t find it. I can’t find any committees either including this strategic plan committee. If Sanan believes in transparency he hasn’t convinced the rest of the board of that. They still operate in the dark as far as I’m concerned.
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:19 am
Implementation must be the end result. I see it in Ohio on a much smaller scale; study groups, reports and…..more stuff for dusty basements. It really seems like the industry as a whole has not one clue on what has made the other sports successful during the long era of the Ruffian tragedy to the present, where now the average sports fan only cares about racing a few minutes a year (Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes, if a Triple Crown is on the line).
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:47 pm
This is all horsepucky.
Blind ambition (and some bit of greed) has already damaged the Breeders’ Cup; if these folks try to tear it up even more in search of a non-existant pot of gold, then you might as well stick a fork in it.
What these people have always failed to fully grasp is that the Breeders’ Cup grew to the heights that it did for one very simple reason and one reason only: it was far and away the single best day of wagering in all of international horseracing. What the BC was, pre-2007, was a tightly packed day of racing combined with a sensical, plentiful-but-not-too-much wagering menu that was a horseplayer’s nirvana. The Breeders’ Cup name, the big horses, network television coverage and purple saddlecloths contributed very little; it has always been the wagering oppportunities for the core horseplayer on that one day that was the main draw.
So what did they do? They tore that beautiful wagering menu apart, threw in a bunch of totally unnecessary races, stretched it over two days and ruined what was the best wagering product (yes, it is a product) created in horseracing history. Why do you think the BC Ultra Pick 6 handle has been cut almost in half over the last two years? Why do you think the Pick 4s, which had experienced huge growth for years, have stagnated the last two years? Sure, the economy has been a factor (this year only, really), but the delicate balance of what was once a perfect wagering menu was thrown completely off. It will be impossible to get that delicate balance back without contraction.
$200 million on what, Satish? BC hats and t-shirts? Give me a break. This is just another guy that has failed to grasp what the true essence of the BC always was–a horseplayer’s delight. And this is for sure: no big-name consulting firm is going to have the first clue what the horseplayers want. Like the BC’s current CMO Peter Land, they’ll try and come up with big “branding” and “media”-friendly initiatives that don’t mean squat and have zero impact when it comes to generating the wagering dolar. Media coverage, in this day and age of fragmentation, means practically nothing and is simply a crutch for not delivering results.
The BC should have stayed the course three years ago (okay, a race or two on the main day would not have killed it) and focused on the one true big area of potential growth: international simulcasting, particularly in Asia. But inadvertently, by diluting the product the way they have, they’ve made it even more less likely that places like Singapore, Malaysia, other parts of Europe and even Asia will embrace the idea of piping the signal in for their customers…
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:35 pm
I’ll tell you one thing.
You can’t see jack from 500,000 miles.
January 26th, 2009 at 12:51 am
When an organization feels a need for outside consultants to do it’s business planning, what it actually needs is a new chief executive.
Nobody should hold their breath waiting for a Sanan initiative to produce anything. Twice in the past I have given him information on bad things within Breeders’ Cup. He was unwilling to take action on any of it.
Certainly Blum’s article was negative. How could it be otherwise when there is so much to be negative about?
Think about it. The BC Board is so worried about finances it decided to scrap the stakes program. On the other hand, absent any good ideas from it’s executives, it hires a consultant. Consultants are super-expensive. Think about it.
February 2nd, 2009 at 7:18 am
[...] responded with a counterpoint to Blum that was also published in the Thoroughbred Times. Sanan spoke with the Paulick Report about Blum’s criticism, and also outlined a Breeders’ Cup strategic planning committee [...]
February 2nd, 2009 at 7:18 am
[...] responded with a counterpoint to Blum that was also published in the Thoroughbred Times. Sanan spoke with the Paulick Report about Blum’s criticism, and also outlined a Breeders’ Cup strategic planning committee [...]
February 3rd, 2009 at 9:06 pm
[...] to Blum’s commentary that was published in the Thoroughbred Times of Jan. 24. Sanan later spoke with the Paulick Report about some of the issues raised by Blum, along with his own role as chairman of a Breeders’ [...]
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:20 am
[...] Cup is in the middle of a long-term strategic planning process that we’ll be telling you more about in the coming weeks. This work couldn’t come at a [...]