Churchill Chief in Frank Talk With Wall Street Journal

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Robert Evans, the horse owner-breeder who became president and chief executive of Churchill Downs nine months ago, offered his advice on the future of his company and the horse industry in a frank interview that appears in the Monday, April 16, edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Evans was one of six CEOs interviewed in a special section of the business news daily. The others were Steve Bennett, CEO of General Electric; Larry Montgomery, Kohl’s CEO; David Brandon, Domino’s CEO; Northwestern Mutual CEO Edward Zore; and Randy Mott, CEO of Hewlett Packard.

According to an editor’s note in the special section, the CEOs profiled in the report “all faced different problems in different industries. But they were all trying to figure out how the world was changing—and how their companies had to change with it.”

In the interview, which is primarily a question and answer format, Evans said the lack of optimism within the company and the industry he has sensed during his tenure at the helm of CDI was unexpected.

“The thing that has struck me about the company and the industry is that it sees its future in a very limited sense,” Evans said. “Maybe I’ll see it that way, too, five or 10 years hence. We’ll try to make progress. Maybe we won’t. But it seems like the perspective on the future was very limiting, almost not a a lot of growth opportunities left for the company or the industry, a lot of external pressures on this business that are mostly unfavorable, not a great sense of optimism about where it could go.”

Evans said horse racing and Churchill need to embrace technological tools and try new and creative ways to reach new customers, especially younger patrons. He said one of the biggest problems within the industry is that horse racing has become less interesting to a populace with a lot of different options to choose from.

“We’ve stayed the same and they have a whole bunch of additional things they can spend their money on. Or we can just say we’ve let our product slowly deteriorate. Clearly we are less interest than we were 20, 40, 60 years ago.”

As part of the interview, Evans offered the following five tips on ways to revitalize horse racing:
--Invent new ways to be on the same old races
--Experiment with cell phones, interactive games, even computer chips that ride horseback
--Emphasize the human-interest side of horse racing
--Hire some horse-racing novices
--Act fast, before you have time to think of all the reasons why something won’t work.

Read the Wall Street Journal interview with Robert Evans

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