Interview with an ACMA

Richard Atkinson ACMA
Finance director,
The All England Lawn Tennis
and Croquet Club (AELTC)

Last year you were CFO of $6bn media empire Time Inc in New York. Has moving to Wimbledon been rather a culture shock?

Some of my friends joked that I was having a midlife crisis, but I knew that I didn’t want to return to a big corporation. I had been at Time Inc since 1991 and I’d enjoyed a great lifestyle, but I’d had enough. When this job came along I knew it was right for me – I simply had to convince them that I was right for it.

Although Wimbledon isn’t a media business, it is a global media event and it helps that I understand that world. I’m also a sports nut: my father was a professional cricketer, so I’ve played cricket all my life, as well as golf, squash and tennis. I ski, too, and I cycle to work most days. I’ve attended big sports events around the world, including the Olympics, European football finals, baseball games and test matches – most of the time at my own expense. This is important, since I understand the issues that are important to real punters rather than those who come on corporate freebies. My wife and daughters also play tennis, so they’re far more excited about my job than if I’d joined, say, a football club.

What else is new at Wimbledon?

We’re in the middle of a construction project that will run into hundreds of millions of pounds over 15 to 20 years. This started in the early nineties with a new numberone court and new players’ areas, changing rooms and a broadcast centre. Work on centre court started a couple of years ago. We should have a fixed roof on it and new entertainment facilities by next year’s championships and a retractable roof will be in place in 2009. We’ve got thousands of tonnes of machinery up there that’s got to be tested and then we have to install a complex air-conditioning system – you can’t have soggy grass for tennis and when you have 15,000 people in there on a warm, damp day it’s hard to maintain the right humidity.

While we’re clearing out the champagne crates on the Monday morning after this year’s tournament, they’ll be bringing the cranes back in. It’s a huge project, but it is on schedule and on budget. I qualified with CIMA in the construction industry, so at least I understand the language of engineers and surveyors.

So will this year’s championships take place on a building site?

There will be some rough edges – a few bare concrete floors, for example, – but it will still be fully decorated for the fortnight. The atmosphere has to be “English garden”, so it’s important that we have all the usual elements in place. Wimbledon still has a wonderfully classy English feel that seems to rub off on the teenagers in trainers just as much as the ladies in cocktail dresses.

Sports events are big business. How can you move with the times and still keep the image of Edwardian elegance and vicarage garden parties? Every part of this industry is different. At one extreme you have US tycoons buying sports teams and at the other you have the Olympics, which is all cost. We are somewhere in the middle. Some commercial ideas would be out of the question for Wimbledon. They might make money in the short term, but they would destroy the
aura of the championships. You won’t see an “Emirates Centre Court” any time soon, but we do have a commercial outlook. For me, that was one attraction of the job. It’s not run as a charity; it’s totally focused on its corporate function of producing the best tennis event in the world and supporting British tennis. What is the relationship between the club and the championships?
Most of the year we are a private club. The championships are a partnership between the AELTC and the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA). The annual “surplus” earned by the tournament – £25m to £30m – goes to the LTA for developing UK tennis. The only analogous sporting relationship to ours is that of the Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters. The championships are the only big event we run regularly, although we’ll host a Davis Cup match in September and the 2012 Olympics will be exciting, of course. The last time Wimbledon was involved in the Olympics was 1908.

Where does the surplus come from?

Our main revenue streams are ticketing, TV rights, official suppliers– eg, Rolex timepieces; IBM, which provides the scoring technology and the web sites; Lanson champagne; and Buxton water – and hospitality. Official suppliers get discreet branding opportunities, but we have to be careful that this doesn’t affect Wimbledon’s image. At the moment we’re renegotiating our US TV deals. Finance is also extremely busy immediately after the tournament, since the organisers tend to go on holiday as soon as it ends, but then come back and want to see all the figures.

Wimbledon hit the headlines this year for promising to pay female players the same prize money as the men. Was this the last relic of the championships’ early days? The decision was part of the evolution of the club and the championships. It’s an indication of how the place has transformed. Wimbledon has done a great job in keeping pace with the changes and I’m part of the team trying to keep this going. We constantly mix tradition with development. For example, we were almost the last tournament to do away with white tennis balls and introduce yellow ones, and we still have a rule that players’ clothing must be “almost entirely in white”. We use the latest technology to eliminate controversy over line calls, but we ensure that this isn’t obtrusive, so that the game is still recognisably the same as it always was.

What will you be doing during Wimbledon fortnight itself – apart from signing the prize cheques?

Roger Federer may be rich, but it’s easy to forget that most tennis players are not. Every year some of the eastern European kids run out of money. They know that they’ll win some, but they have to ask us for an advance. They can’t believe the cost of living in London and they’re usually sharing with several others some way out of town. Tennis is a young person’s game and many of them are still teenagers. The AELTC is obviously far smaller than Time Inc. How has this affected your work? I don’t mind getting my hands dirty doing more practical jobs. I now have only ten people in my team, but, in common with lots of CIMA members, I’ve spent much of my career in operational jobs and I’m comfortable in the grey area where pure accountancy stops and running a business starts. This has helped me to move from a big organisation without worrying about not having teams of overqualified MBAs behind me.

What advice would you offer CIMA professionals who are just starting their careers?

Get a job where you are responsible for the whole of something as early as possible, even if that something is quite small. It’s better to be in charge of finance in a £50m firm than to be one of many people reporting to someone in charge of finance in a £500m company. Responsibility is more important than scale. The buck stops with you and you need to know about lots of things, from technical accounting to managing people. If you’re in a big company, try to move to a smaller subsidiary to get this experience. You won’t regret it. It’s also important not to rule anything out. I applied for this job straight off the FT web site. It’s a lesson for us all: you network like mad, meet everyone in your industry and end up getting a job the same way you did in your mid-twenties.

Advantage Atkinson

• 1981 Graduates with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
• 1984 Qualifies with CIMA at construction firm John Mowlem.
• 1984 – 91 Works for KPMG Consulting, moves on to Lloyds Bank andthen becomes financial controller at commercial estate agency Richard Ellis.
• 1991 – 2006 Joins Time Inc in London as FD, later becoming president of its European operations. In 1999 he is appointed CFO and also made responsible for most of Time Inc’s infrastructure groups, such as IT, HR, admin, real estate and production. He becomes a key player in its $3bn M&A programme, including the 2001 acquisition of IPC, the UK’s largest magazine publisher.
• 2006 Becomes finance director of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.