10 minute read
CEO PROFILE: MARK MAYBURY
Keeping a steady course
If the course of a new sailing club CEO is 1000 tacks, Middle Harbour Yacht Club CEO Mark Maybury is about halfway there. Grant Jones reports.
MIDDLE HARBOUR YACHT Club in the early 1970s was all dark timbers, silver trophies, musty storerooms and old sea salts. For this writer, the return to the clubhouse after sailing tiny timber Flying Ants on Sydney Harbour offered cold lemonade, maybe some hot chips on the tiny beach for the kids and a beer or wine for the adults. In the ensuing half-century, not much had changed.
Mark Maybury came in as Covid started to hammer the industry. Having worked under the stewardship of Richard Errington, CEO of the then Rooty Hill RSL Club – pre Wests HQ – Maybury knew that change in clubs needs to be an evolution, not a revolution.
“I enjoy clubs and working with the members and the cultural component of it,” he says.
Limited by a 100-berth marina, significant maintenance costs in a “brutal” environment, a tired and costly F&B offering, rusted-on membership, lots of wasted space, compliance costs and sub-lease planning hurdles, much needed doing.
With just four full-time staff, himself included, some part-timers and casuals and an array of elderly volunteers, Maybury decided to maximise the things he could change rather than worry about the things he couldn’t.
While they continue to undertake general maintenance, the ability of elderly volunteers to undertake some of the heavier work is declining. The average age of the 100 or so members is 60-65, with 70 per cent older males. Encouraging female membership with a women-only race series and using an all-female crew or mixed crew with a female skipper on donated boats has gone some way towards arresting the decline in women members. Meanwhile, a junior school holiday program with 300-400 children per year come through, is effectively long daycare with few converting to full membership.
“We can do the junior training but at some point, there has to be a full commitment from the individual and the family and that is time and financial resourcing, boat purchase, then that becomes expensive,” Maybury says. “Those that do come through have a tendency to come from a sailing family.”
Juniors also usually come back when they are 30 or 40 for twilight sailing, but the club needed to look at compacting sailing opportunities that don’t eat into too much of a weekend.
“The problem with sailing, like golf, is also that time constraint.
We are finding that it is getting a bit more difficult for our weekend sailing to get crew. Race fleets on weekends are also declining,” he says. “It’s happening all over the place. We all have the same issues. The same with volunteers. They are all ageing … and some of those boat owners are getting older too and they are not as active or as competitive as they used to be.”
A sea change needed to happen. While his expertise is not sailing, it still is the core of Middle Harbour Yacht Club and needed to be addressed.
“How can we change the program to make it more attractive to people who have time constraints?” he asks. “Is it a shorter series or not racing every weekend or racing on Saturday or Sunday in a shorter format? We are just playing around with that at the moment because we see what we need to make an adjustment to that.”
While partnership in boat ownership and growth in cruising and leisure sailing means people want to come back to the club for a drink and a bite, competition numbers are dwindling.
“All the drop-off in race fleets has a knock-on effect to other parts of our club, particularly our on-land components hence why we’ve had to make some adjustments to our food and beverage,” he says.
Eating into profit
Several F&B options had been attempted before Maybury’s arrival, including the standalone Cala Luna restaurant upstairs. Hit by fire in 2015, it never really recovered. The club’s own in-house offering was also burning through the cash.
While crew membership went up during Covid, and boats unable to head north for the winter still paid berthing fees, that income wasn’t a long-term solution.
“The environment we sit in is also brutal,” he says. “We have ageing assets with most of the timber building over 50 years old.”
While it still needs a lick of paint or a coat of varnish, the club also needs solid cash flow. So the new CEO set about finding new ways to generate revenue. Maybury then found that more than 38 per cent of the total floor space was not being used efficiently: storage rooms used as dumping grounds and a little-used trophy room among them. A financial solution was buried in the sand –somewhere – he just had to find it.
Buried treasure
And he did. Junk was removed from storage rooms and the space was converted into sail storage. Those leases started generating revenue. Australian Sailing, the governing body for the sport of sailing, took the old restaurant space as a longterm tenant. More passive income.
Sydney Harbour Surf Club, a memberbased surf-ski operation, was the next tenant to fit the brief. Paddlers can access their surf skis and kayaks 24/7, and are usually gone by mid-morning, with little crossover or crowding, maximising another space.
But the downstairs cafe, meanwhile, had few visitors and even fewer visited the clubhouse upstairs. Sailing also only takes place 120 days a year,and there were only a few days when the club was full outside of twilight sailing.
“Then you have 300 people coming off a boat who want to be fed and watered. But that is only 22 times a year,” he says. The in-house catering was also losing money “hand over fist”.
“The revenue levers that we could pull are very limited and our membership has remained pretty static,” Maybury says. “What was key for me and what I looked at was about bringing traffic and life down here and things that would complement our other services.”
During Covid, locals approached the club looking for small office spaces but that wasn’t the right fit.
“Bringing tenants in had to bring a value back to the club in one form, value back to members or second revenue or like activity,” he says. “When we looked at putting partners in here, we looked at what else did they bring [to the club and its members].”
Presenting new ideas and concepts to members was also key in getting ideas over the line.
“Their main thing was how do we take the members through it,” Maybury says of older members who considered the club “their” space. That included an idle former boat brokerage office and junior sailing school, that covered a hidden gem.
“I was standing at the junior sailing office one day looking out the window, looking at The Spit and it was winter and the sun was streaming in. I thought, ‘This is great. If we open this…’.”
So artists’ impressions and an initial concept got members excited. While a fundraising effort was set at $200,000, the gutting of the space and some structural work cost about $350,000. So it would take a lot more to create a quality restaurant.
“It needed to go that next step of having a full kitchen so we tried to raise funds through our foundation,” he says, but the club just couldn’t raise enough and didn’t have the expertise.
“I went back to the board and they all wanted a better restaurant and I said unless you can give me the money we need to look at some more alternatives.”
Maybury proposed putting the venue out to tender on a separate lease, separate title with a liquor licence. The club then asked a local commercial real estate agent who had a queue of people looking for waterside venues. Among them were hospitality duo, chefs-turned-restaurateurs Mitchell Davis and Gavin Gray of Great Eats, the successful catering consultancy behind Bondi Icebergs Club.
“I went ‘Bingo’. This is perfect,” says Maybury. “It was the same vision we had. We aligned and we’ve ended up doing a straight lease with them,” he says.
St Siandra was born. The club then struck a deal to lease the function space above the restaurant. While St Siandra is open to the general public, the operators also offer a tighter menu to the members next door.
“The more successful they are, the more successful we will be,” Maybury says.
F&B is now cash positive. Over the past year, commercial revenue has also increased by 82 per cent. While building issues delayed the opening of St Siandra, things are expected to heat up this summer with forward bookings looking promising. New social members have also signed up.
“It’s brought a lot of life around here,” Maybury says. “It’s a different audience. There is a whole new clientele down here.”
Rusted-on sailing members now bring their families and friends down, proudly showing off the new offering and there are other benefits.
“Now that it has freed up the cash for us we can now reinvest in the club,” says Maybury.
That includes painting the dark clubhouse interior white, putting in new floors, adding a new face and stone top to the bar, new lighting, a big screen, new audio, maybe some new furniture and a small service kitchen.
“I want to turn it almost into a sports bar,” he says. The existing waterfront admin space will be transformed into a large foyer with member seating and windows opening to the beach with views across to Clontarf. The new foyer will also alleviate congestion in the breezeway between the club and the crowds heading to St Siandra.
“While it was a little bit bumpy, to start, it’s now swinging,” Maybury says, justifiably pleased with the result.
The way forward
While the core of any club is community, having an asset with no benefit to members is no good to anyone. A solution has to be found. At a recent club managers forum, Maybury offered that F&B solutions may not only be black and white.
“Don’t just think the traditional way of doing it yourself or finding a caterer to do it,” he says. “Think about how can you use your asset and how can you separate it.
“We are not reliant on them, we kept some of our independence and we are leveraging off them,” he explains of St Siandra. “Realise that there is value in that. I could have just rented to the first person that came along. I could have got the same rent but was that really going to give me the best value?
“And don’t be scared to push back on your members. Yes, we have cut some of your area out but we have given back.”
Maybury has been at MHYC for three years and the sailing strategy is next on his list, but it’s an area he has no expertise in. Unlike Rooty Hills’ 50,000 members, MHYC sailors know exactly who you are, so it may be getting a little small.
“Even though it is a club, like Rooty Hill, members are passionate about it. I guess you’ve got more of a smaller membership base very wedded to their club. There are many members who have sailed here since they were kids.
“They are a lot more noticeable, and you see them a lot.”
As an example, his one and only lunch at St Siandra was interrupted by members wanting to have a word. It’s a minor issue compared to when he started.
“My biggest problem now is where to put the trophies which are now sitting in a storeroom!”
