Trish Egan appointment brings a corporate edge to TBNSW

Written by Jessica Owers

Cover image courtesy of TBNSW

In an appointment widely welcomed across the industry, Sydney woman Trish Egan has joined Thoroughbred Breeders NSW (TBNSW) as a director, bringing ‘diversity to a group that is achieving some major outcomes’, according to a statement on Tuesday.

Egan will join the current board members at TBNSW, a team that currently includes President Hamish Esplin (who took over last year from Stuart Lamont), Vice-President Caroline Searcy, Treasurer Paddy Power and fellow Directors Peter Orton, Olly Tait and Vin Cox, plus Executive Officer Julianne Christopher.

Esplin said Egan’s appointment would bring a world of experience to the TBNSW, given that she was a two-year vice-chairman of the Australian Turf Club (ATC), a role she uptook in 2016.

“A popular and highly respected board member and regular racegoer, Trish is a very personable and highly professional individual, and she will add enormously to the current board’s skillset,” Esplin said.

He added that TBNSW had gone out of its way in recent years to appoint directors that would reflect its members’ aims, something that was important in the industry’s increasingly commercial and political climate.

Perfect complement

Often, the use of the word ‘diverse’ assumes a gender connotation, but when it comes to the appointment of Egan this week, the TBNSW Vice-President, Caroline Searcy, said gender wasn’t necessarily a factor.

“What Trish brings to the board is that high level of marketing and business acumen,” she said, speaking with TDN AusNZ. “If we’d gone for someone different, like someone working on one of the major farms or even someone younger, we wouldn’t have achieved that diversity.

“So while it’s great that we’ve got another woman on the board, and gender diversity is an important conversation these days, this was more about bringing Trish’s particular skills to the table.”

While Egan served as a director of the ATC for seven years, she’s also held marketing roles with the likes of Kimberly-Clark, SmithKline Beecham and Vision Australia. For a year, she was the business manager for Vandyke Racing at Warwick Farm and, currently, she is the chair of the ATC Charitable Foundation.

For close to six years she was a trustee of Racing NSW’s Thoroughbred Welfare Fund, and all this puts her marketing skillset closely aligned with the racing industry. As such, she is a perfect complement to the current TBNSW board, according to Searcy.

“It really is an incredible board now,” she said. “Obviously, the focus of TBNSW is to serve its members as best we can and to find the things that affect them day to day, and staffing is a huge issue right now, as is thoroughbred care and welfare.

“We have a board now with real experience, from people like Vin Cox, who heads up a global breeding empire like Godolphin, to Olly Tait, who is a family breeder. Even myself, being the archetypal small breeder, tends to represent those very small breeders out there.

“So between us, I feel like we cover all bases when it comes to representing our members, and diversifying the board wasn’t necessarily coming from a gender point of view, but from a governance point of view.”

Searcy said that Egan is well-respected, which makes her a likeable, approachable addition.

“She is someone with great dignity and a passion for racing, and she’s been involved in rehoming horses with the ATC and the everyday running of that Club,” Searcy said. “If you’re involved at that level as vice-chair, what’s she seen and done will help us with everything from sponsorships to rehoming.”

Corporate-minded

Egan currently lives in Cremorne, in Sydney’s north, with her husband Michael, and they have a son, Liam. She has long been a Sydney girl, growing up around Chatswood.

Egan achieved a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Technology, and she’s a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. But even with a resumé as glittering as this, Egan is still excited about joining the TBNSW board.

“It’s an honour to be asked to join this team representing the breeders of almost half the annual Australian foal crop,” she said in a statement. “I’m excited to join the TBNSW board at this important stage of industry development and growth.”

She acknowledged the challenges faced in the industry right now and, importantly, seems to already appreciate the critical role of breeders in the bigger picture. This was an important element in her selection this week.

“We were discussing at committee level who we needed to really complement the skillset of the current board,” Searcy said. “We wanted someone that would fully understand the industry and, from that role at the ATC, Trish really fitted that bill.

“She has a level of professionalism too that comes with corporate governance, and she’ll bring that aboard. We are the third-biggest breeding region the world over, so I think her skills will fit really nicely into everything we are trying to achieve at TBNSW.”

Already, Egan has agreed to sit alongside Peter Orton on the staffing sub-committee of TBNSW to drive its pathways program for industry workers.

The education and qualification agenda is very important to TBNSW as it tackles staff recruitment and retainment across the industry, and it’s an agenda that Egan is already across, by many accounts.