At the helm

RYA Chief Executive Rod Carr spoke to James Boyd about the sweeping change within the RYA, their new initiatives and GBR Challenge

Up there with the Ellen MacArthur phenomenon and Peter Harrison taking the UK back into the America's Cup, probably one of the greatest single things to happen in British sailing recently was Rod Carr's appointment as Chief Executive of the Royal Yachting Association.

Carr has a straightforward, practical no-nonsense approach that permeated throughout the Yacht Racing division during his tenure there and now is being applied throughout the Association as a whole. The Daily Sail caught up with him at a time when significant change is afoot at the RYA.

"There are two things this year really - the work which McKinsey, the consultancy, did with us for five months on a pro bono basis," says Carr. "That has led us to new strategic priorities for the Association - what we should do with our time and our expertise."

An audit was carried out on the RYA by McKinsey & Co, one of the biggest management consultancies in the world, remarkably for free - Carr says they do one charitable audit per year and the RYA were this year's recipient. "It would have cost us many hundreds of thousands of pounds to have that work done – they had five full time people working on it for five months, which has been a huge bonus," he says.

The McKinsey report focussed on the strategic priorities of the RYA as well as its structure and the way it carries out its role. "Can we be smarter in the way we deliver the services? The answer is obviously, yes," says Carr. "And what are our strategic priorities in the short term, over the next couple of years? And they are to do everything that we’re already doing well, continue to do them well – so we have a good youth, Olympic and learning to sail programmes - but in addition to do two new things."

Of concern to the RYA is that recent surveys of our boating habits, such as Keynote (2001) and another carried out this year by the BMF, show a decline in the participation in boating, although boat ownership remains buoyant and the national spend on boats is going up (ie the BMF is happy). Specifically the number of people who go boating regularly, ie four times or more per annum, is going down.

Carr has his own theories about why this is: "People are relatively cash rich and time poor increasingly. Another issue is that schools sailing and adventure sailing, because of the demands of the national curriculum and risk and things to do with litigation - have limited the number of youngsters who get introduced to the sport through outdoor education-type facilities – that is another major issue.

"And there is a general sociological change towards people doing activities on a one-off basis. At an extreme level “I’ve been to the South Island in New Zealand, I’ve walked up a glacier, I’ve done a bungee jump and next year I’m going to go on a Sunsail sailing holiday". So it’s what I would call the 'butterfly approach' to experiences. And particularly people in their 20s are beginning to take their leisure in that particular way."

Because of this, the RYA are now working with the BMF to promote boating as a lifestyle sport. "Whereas we [people our age] are comforted by the fact that we’ve always had the sport as a lifestyle - there is a greater proportion of young people, particularly the under 40s, who dip in and out of various sports and the classic one of course is snow skiing, where you might say you are a skier which means you go every other year," explains Carr.

"Now that is the problem and it is beginning to affect sailing. You might ask someone if they sail but the fact is that they only sail occasionally and often it is on a 'pay and play' basis. So we’ve got to reconnect those people that are doing sailing on a pay and play basis whether they be corporate or Sunsail and get them to do it more often so that it becomes a sport for their life with them."

To achieve this the RYA and BMF have set up the grandly titled 'Promotion of Sailing Task Force', a committee that includes the likes of Mark Turner, Tim Coventry and the BMF's James Gower. The Task Force has had its first meeting to brainstorm ideas. "For the first time we are trying to address the issue, because although it is in the headline statement of the RYA – ‘promote’ - we’ve not actually done it," says Carr. "We offer training schemes, but we don’t actually go out and promote the sport and now we’ve definitely signed up to do that."

The other strategic priority is one of safety. At present Carr says there are an increasing number of water-borne accidents and statistics showing a majority of the culprits to be motorboaters. "Motorboaters have a disportionate amount of accidents compared to the numbers of them. And more people are going motor boating – it is the growth area in boating, and that is particularly a case in the States and we often follow the States. We, the RYA, don’t connect as well as we should with motor boaters because we come out of a sailing, racing and club-based culture, dare I say it. So we need to connect more with the person who buys their Fletcher or motorboat because if we don’t offer our training to them, there will be an ever-increasing number and then someone will come along and license us all. So that is the other priority - safety with an accent on motorboating safety."

To carry out these strategies the McKinsey report recognised that the RYA should develop its partnerships. "We want to and are working very closely with the BMF and the RNLI where appropriate," says Carr, "because each one of us in our sphere is not big enough to make a difference. But if we work together with Sport England or the Environment Agency in other sectors of our work, then I think we can make a difference. If you look at the budgets of some of these other organisations like the RNLI or the Environment Agency they are huge and ours is modest."

"The other thing that we’re signed up to collectively is if we are going to make a difference we have to have more effective partnerships. I don’t have a problem having a row with the MCA on one thing, say we have a disagreement over compulsory licensing improving safety and whether it will improve to safety - we don’t think it does and they think it might - but that doesn’t mean we won’t partner them in an initiative to promote good management of jetskis or something. So we don’t need a one size fits all approach to our partners. We can be grown up about it."

Aside from the strategic priorities, the KcKinsey report also threw up significant modifications in the way the RYA operates.

"If you look back 20 years, there was a group of 15-20 staff here at the RYA, a large number of expert committees with a lot of people representing lots of other people, so the GP14s would be represented for example. And that worked well enough at that time. But things have moved on. Knowledgeable volunteers are becoming increasingly hard to find with the time to input."

So hard is it in fact that Carr says: "It would embarrass me to tell you how few people stand for RYA elected positions. It makes local government elections look popular."

He continues: "So one of the KcKinsey things that’s been accepted by Council – we should continue to have roughly the same number of groups, advising on things like team racing, SOLO, Olympics, the youth program and so on, but they should be small, ie 4-6 people. They should have a rolling email agenda. And we would expect by and large that group to be led by a professional staff member."

Carr says that RYA SOLO, a committee set up three years ago with the remit of developing singlehanded offshore racing in the UK, which this journalist in fact sat on during the brief period it functioned, was one of his biggest failures over the last three years for just this reason. "Why SOLO fell down was that there was no one here who had the time and expertise to push it forward. Guys like you and Mark who had the expertise and not the time.

"I think what McKenzie said “well no wonder”. What you need to do with the Marks and Jameses of this world is to realise that they can only contribute ideas and strategy and what you need to do is to have a worker within the office to actually make it happen. So you become staff-led, with the audit and strategy being put in by an expert group of volunteers."

This way of operating - smaller committees, often having discussion over email rather than face to face - is going to be put into effect across all the RYA's numerous committees. "So effectively the work - such as where the next youth championships is going to be – is going to be staff-led, signed off by the expert group probably by email and it never gets referred upwards at all. They get on and do it. So we’ve got a bunch of membership of committees proposals that by and large halves the size of committees, not the number of committee - you still need a racing rules committee - but the number of people sitting on them is drastically reduced. This means we’ll have to improve our communications as an aside to that."

Onto more localised drives within yacht racing and the RYA have their recently launched keelboat initiative, that Volvo are putting their financial muscle behind. More details about this are to be announced at London Boat Show.

"Since match racing got kicked out of the Games last time, we struggled to get government funding into a keelboat program, so although the will was there, the money for the last few years hasn’t been there in the RYA Keelboat race training programme, " says Carr. "Now that is still the case from the government point of view. We’ve always known what we would like to do, if only we could get some more resource to do this kind of thing. And at the end of the day until you have the resource it is hard to move forward.

"As it happens Volvo repositioned themselves because they wished to change their global brand image to compete more directly with Mercedes and BMW. And so the tactics of marketing directly to families with wellies with labradors in estate cars doesn’t meet those objectives as well as it used to and being more associated with the Ocean Race - keelboats, risk, excitement and slightly more upmarket to put it colloquially - does, hence them being interested in partnering us in the keelboat training programmes."

Carr says that the keelboat initiative may involve updating the RYA's fleet of First Class 8s, although these may find a wider role than match racing alone and could for example be used for offshore sailing or even singlehanding...

Another major task for Carr is the move of the RYA headquarters from Romsey to Hamble in mid-March. "It’s got nothing to do with Hamble being the centre of yachting in the UK," he says. "It is near enough to where we are presently so that we aren’t going to lose staff. And it is an affordable site.

"The new premises offer open plan, modern accommodation. It is not an icon building, it is just a modern semi purpose-built brick box. It is open plan and it has got all the modern double floor cabling. And it gives us a modern flexible office with a nice working environment. We don’t have that here."

At present the RYA employ 96 people, although Carr adds "that includes a lot of peripatetic coaching staff who I don’t seem to meet on the stairs very often..." As with their existing property the RYA will own the freehold of the new building, located on the right as you drive into Hamble.

And the rumour that racing skipper turned property tycoon Lawrie Smith is going to buy the current premises, where the RYA have been located for the last 14 years, is also not true, although Smith did look round it.

Within the sport generally one of the greatest issues has been the UK's return to the America's Cup arena thanks to Peter Harrison and GBR Challenge. Carr visited the team in New Zealand prior to them being knocked out.

"To summarise you always hope that the old truism about having to do two or three campaigns to get a fast enough boat won’t be true for you, but it is true and that is the reality," he says. "And everyone knew the reality but you want to believe that you might get a break, get lucky or have some inspiration that hasn’t been thought of before. That hasn’t happened and the truism is right: time is the enemy of any new campaign.

"Having said that I think that the sailors have acquitted themselves very well – not perfect – and there are many more positives to take away than negatives. In fact there are no negatives - there are positives and reality I think. The positives being the morale and cohesion in the sailing team and the reality is that you can’t bring together a group of designers and have a world beating Cup boat in two years.

"I was down there for only a short time, but the options for test and change which the other boats had which we hadn’t. The good teams were all characterised by having at least one if not two fast boats and then a number of rig and appendage options, trim options, that are already pre-tested, so they could say “right we want to be 5 seconds faster upwind in the medium and we know that this configuration will give us it, albeit if we’ll be a bit slower say downwind" and they’d got that menu while we only had half that menu because the cooks hadn’t had a time to build it up.

"I think some of the actions they did to do that made the boat more difficult to handle were a direct result of them saying ”well we need more speed and we’ll sacrifice manoeuvrability to get that speed” and I think they were quite sensible options - perhaps they had no others, had their backs against the wall so “let’s try this…”

"So I think they made very few decisions that were wrong and I think that is a great compliment to the campaign. And some of the decisions, like getting the Japanese boats, were inspired. But time is the enemy and it is brilliant to see that Peter [Harrison] has taken the early decision - albeit with some caveats - to roll the campaign on and keep the key people involved.

"The last thing I’d say is that Ian [Walker] and the management team are instituting a proper and thorough review – which is absolutely crucial before the intellectual knowledge from everyone gets dissipated - and I regard that as being everyone from the person who sweeps the yard to the RIB driver, they have all got things to contribute to make the next campaign better and that needs to be documented (because I am presuming that the whole campaign of 100 people won’t go forwards for the next 2 years). But everyone has got some insight that has got to collated and documented and then the decision makers say “right these are the key things” and then they move on. That is absolutely crucial they do that because if they don’t we’re likely to have more of the same – which is fine because we’ll get there eventually, but the quickest way is to do some analysis…"

Personally Carr has now sold his Edelcat 35ft cruising catamaran and was last seen pacing the corridors of Paris Boat Show looking for a replacement, something that combines some space with a bit of pace. "At least it'll be quite nice not having to do the antifouling this winter..."