Otaki-Māori Racing Club has a rich history in New Zealand racing, and its recent resurgence has been greatly assisted by the introduction of their General Manager, Ben Jamison.

Before entering the club in 2017, Jamison had little experience with the industry, having worked as a business consultant in Wellington, but family ties to Otaki-Māori made his first foray into racing a perfect fit.

“For about the last 15 years, I’ve been working as a business consultant. My previous role was down at the Taranaki Whānui helping the iwi there,” Jamison said.

“My role at the time was to stabilise their financial position and create new revenue streams, that’s what I specialise in.

“In 2017, I was contracted to the Otaki-Māori Racing Club. My father (Tom Jamison) has been involved in the industry for a long time, he is the President of the club, so it’s been really good to have him as a guiding hand into racing.”

Over the past seven years, Jamison has learned the ropes of managing a team of staff both on and outside of raceday, with his team including Brent Wall (racing manager) and Kane Smith (track manager), as well as tenant trainers, and a multitude of casual employees.

“Day to day, we have about five regular staff, but on raceday, we get anywhere from 50-100. We’ve got a pool of casual staff as most clubs do that we can call on,” Jamison said.

“We’ve got it down to a fine art now, I’ve got my track manager and his staff that prepare the tracks accordingly, but I also call on other staff to tidy the buildings up and get everything looking as nice as we can.

“My track manager and I start around a similar time on race morning, he’s a bit earlier doing penetrometer readings and I do a few hours of preparation to ensure the day will run smoothly.

“We’ve currently got eight tenant trainers and two visiting that frequently ship their horses in every other day. Our numbers are roughly 60-70 horses training on site every day, which is great. When I started, we had about 30 horses so that’s doubled as well, it’s fantastic.

“There are certain areas of relationships that I try to maintain with our tenant trainers, making sure everyone is happy.

“I let them do their thing, but if they ever need any help, they don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

“It really runs like clockwork after all these years.”

A significant aspect of Jamison’s position has been generating revenue opportunities for Otaki-Māori, which with his expertise, alongside plenty of creativity, has greatly assisted in the longevity of the club.

“I think the biggest challenge has been making the place financially thrive, you really have to look outside of the training and raceday operations and be clever in supplementing that revenue,” he said.

“In the first two years, I just worked to stabilise the financial position of the place, and these last five years have been really focussed on not only refining racedays and training activities, but also looking at non-racing revenue to support that.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to triple our functions and events over that seven-year period, and on top of that, we have a couple of commercial tenants now in buildings that we hardly used before.

“We have an eight-bedroom house on-site that I’ve tenanted out to a local family, it was once used to house trainers and visiting jockeys.

“We had a farmer’s market running that we are hoping to get rolling again soon, to be run every Sunday.

“As many people know, we also have a 500-house development that is on the verge of consent at the moment, and that will be largely on disused land around the place. That’s a 10-year process that will hopefully get underway soon.

“There are a couple of things we are still looking to work towards, there are some building improvements we’d love to make, as like most racing clubs, we have 50-to-70 year-old infrastructure.

“We’d love to improve at least one of our two grandstands with a full rebuild, that’s a dream. I think it could become a reality if we play our cards right.

“Otherwise, improving some of the pipes under the ground that are coming up 100-years-old, and a couple of tracks that we’d love to upgrade for training and other purposes, such as trials.

“We have these ideas in the pipeline, but it is just making it feasible.”

Whilst maintaining and developing these projects, Jamison holds a great sense of pride in continuing the legacy of the country’s only Māori racing club, alongside his committee.

“There were a number of Māori racing clubs a few decades ago, as historically, Māori weren’t allowed to attend the races at many clubs,” he said.

“We took initiative to start our own and Otaki is the only one remaining, so we pride ourselves on that very much. We’re very unique and our daily operations are in relation to Te Reo Māori, as opposed to a more classical business model.

“Our entire committee is made up of local iwi members, that’s a requirement to be on the committee.

“In terms of the racing calendar, we are stoked to have feature days including the Raukawa Cup and the Matariki Race Day, which just had its third year. It’s growing and growing, we couldn’t get over how well it’s doing.

“We are very proud of that, and we hope to continue developing aspects of race days that resonate with our uniqueness.”

Looking into the near future, Jamison is motivated to continue building on the progress made in recent years, with summer racing an exciting prospect not only for the club, but also the wider community.

“Summer is always a great time for racing nationwide and internationally as well,” he said.

“We really pride ourselves on having large turnouts to our race days, which particularly comes on our Family Day, which is the dual-code meeting with the Kapiti Harness Racing Club. It’s really focussed on the enjoyment of families and kids, we have all the entertainment for them and that’s scheduled for the 6th of January.

“We have Boxing Day again this year as well, which is always a great turnout. It’s really good, family-focussed summer racing.”