MATT DUNN - A STABLE WITH A UNIQUE SELLING POINT

By HRO | Friday, September 21, 2012

The ''Trainers in Queensland' listing offers the HRO reader the opportunity to find out more about the background, expertise and values of individual trainers in the state. Many will be familiar faces, but their detailed, personal profiles have remained relatively unknown to the larger audience ... until now.

This is the Matthew Dunn story

“I rode for about six years before I started training. I guess the training aspect was pretty much a natural progression from a too heavy jockey to a race horse trainer.

“I rode in Sydney for a short time, mostly the mid-north coast. I was no good at it. I was hopeless and I was always going to get too heavy so it was never going to work. At that time I had no real intention to train ever.

“When I finished riding I looked for a few other things to do. I went back to school and did my HSC to try to maybe go to Uni and that sort of thing, but that was never going to be much fun … and so things just sort of worked themselves out the way they did.

“I got a couple of horses and started training. I was only about twenty then and got my stable numbers up to a small number of about ten or something in Port Macquarie. I went broke and I went back to work for my father. He had an earth-moving business in Sydney. I worked for him for a couple of years and then decided it was time to try training again and I came up to the Gold Coast.

“I trained there for probably about five years and then Gerald Ryan asked me to go and run his Sydney stable … his main stable was up here at the time. I went down there. He forgot to tell me he was going to move there in a couple of years time.

“That really wasn’t what I wanted to do, but it ended up quite good. We sort of set it up together for about two years. I think you need that experience. I think lots of people can train horses and train them well, but you need to go to a big stable to learn how to train lots of them. You know, how to get to that next step by taken on a large number of horses … that’s where many trainers falter because they don’t have that experience.

“You go from ten horses … to fifteen … to, shit, where do I go from here? Whereas, if you can sort of walk into a place where you are training between sixty and seventy horses every day of the week, it becomes a very valuable experience. And then you’ve also got the benefit of exposure to better horses and better clients. You cannot put a value on the contacts you make where you are in that position.

“Everybody has got their own idea on how horses should be trained or worked, which is a good thing otherwise it would all be too mechanical. Gerald is a pretty good trainer. He has been around a long time and he’s got lots of good winners and good horses, so it turned out to be a pretty important part of things for me to go there and do that.

“On the one hand you know consciously that you are learning on certain days. At other times you think, as time goes on, that you are just sort of going through the motions everyday of getting the job done … but you don’t really realize how much knowledge you are picking up.

“The way things were structured down there, I was quite heavily involved in the management of it … the way horses were placed and yearling purchases and that sort of stuff. It was absolutely priceless getting that sort of experience. It was exactly the type of education I was looking for.

“I think training is pretty much something you either do one hundred and fifty percent … or forget it pretty much. You know, you can either have a really good go at it or you can just stand and watch. Most people who take that latter option fail.

“Any business … it all begins with hard work. Beyond that, it’s all a test of character. You know adversity will come your way in one form or another … a quality horse will break down, the weather will test your patience often.

“It’s a tough game, but in saying that, it’s a pretty good life if you can survive. It’s a unique business. You either love it or hate it I suppose. It is difficult game to get out of once you have been in it for a while though. Then you are probably in it for life.

“You see even sometimes high profile people walk away and say they’ve had enough. Then next time you look they are back.

“Yeah, then Gerald moved down to Sydney. I was probably there for about two years. When it was a satellite stable we had forty in work there. Then Gerald moved down and made it the main stable.

“I sort of didn’t want to stick around when that happened. I wanted to try something different, but I decided to stay and I’m glad I did.

“The stable developed to the stage where we were running fourth in fifth in the premiership in Sydney. It was really successful and we had some really good horses come through … and financially it was good too. I was pretty well looked after when I was doing that.

“That then flowed on to what we set up here together. When we came to Murwillumbah, it was considered a strange choice of location in many people’s minds. Some of them said, why did you pick that place?

“Originally we planned to keep the numbers at Murwillumbah to about ten … and just have something that was as far different as the Sydney stable as we could possibly have. We could have gone to the Gold Coast or Eagle Farm but then we would have just have been duplicating what we already doing.

“I wanted to do something different. Gerald probably needed a satellite stable at Murwillumbah like a hole in the head, but we went ahead with it. He probably didn’t have any intention of setting up a satellite stable up here again but, because I’d been with him a long time, he said, yeah sweet, I’ll help you if I can.

“Our biggest concern when we went to Murwillumbah was, where were we going to find staff?

“The good thing is that all the people who work for us now are all local people. We didn’t bring any staff up from Sydney. None of them had real racing backgrounds either. That was positive in that we could train then from scratch … and that’s where my experience of running a big stable kicked in and it has served me well since.

“You can teach somebody to take your role and so on and doing it that way has been a breath of fresh air I can tell you compared to some of the dealings with staff I’d had before.

“We went ok to start with. I then took out a trainer’s license in my own right and then it just evolved into the bloody monster it is now.

“We had two stables that were next to each other. We bought the place that was on the bigger block of land. That was about twelve months ago now.

“It’s just a bloody, long drawn out process. We’ve just got the first section of new stables built now. On our place we've got room for forty-five stables now and we are still leasing another place. In the next six months we’ll build another ten so we’ll have place for fifty-five horses. That’s where we will probably cap the numbers, because that is where we want to be.

“Murwillumbah is a high rainfall area, but the thing they did there was that Racing NSW … I don’t know how long ago, it must have been five or six years ago … they built the club a sand track. I don’t know if it was by fluke or good management or what, but the sand track we’ve got now just improves every time it rains.

“So we’ve got basically an all weather surface that doesn’t have the downfalls of some of these other tracks that are just so high maintenance. It’s a sand track. They put new sand on it every three months. They grade it every day and it’s a perfect surface when it rains.

“It’s probably also like that because there is not much traffic there either. It’s not like a city track where there is four hundred in work. We probably work fifty every morning and there is probably another ten … so there is only seventy horses going around.

“For us, it is almost like having a private track … and the club always tries to help too.

“The biggest problem about being at a city track is the club can’t please everybody. It is just impossible. Then people get upset because they didn’t get this and this. Whereas down there it is different. There are not really trying to please a whole lot of people. There are only a few people there, so it’s manageable and, with their budget, they can maintain their tracks so that you have got a good surface to gallop on when you need it.

“We’ve also got the beach. It’s not very far away. We use that … and we’ve also got the river that we walk horses in … when we have to. We don’t use it just because it is there because that is just too time consuming when you are trying to get a lot of horses worked and you’ve got a good track. It’s not necessary.

“We do use it quite often though with horses with problems and also just to break it up sometimes … just to make things different.

“Most of the owners stayed with me when I went on my own. We lost a few horses … four or five that left for whatever reason. They wanted to move them on.

“When Gerald and I separated there were probably about fifty horses on the books and thirty in work. Out of those fifty, I’d say forty-five stayed … and there’s probably about a hundred on the books now.

“We got lots of new horses and lots of new clients. I mean out client base is probably about five hundred now. That’s a good number … and you need it too in order to sustain things and keep things rolling.

“We’ve concentrated this year on buying more horses and forming partnerships, which is a nervous time when you are in hock for a couple of hundred thousand, but it has worked well.

“I’ve got a good friend, Neil Jenkinson, who is a bloodstock agent. He’s helped me a lot … and Glenlogan has helped me as well.

“I have lots of other important help obviously. Kiera pretty much manages the stable. We’re a pretty good combination. She is the foreperson or whatever you call it these days. She pretty much manages the staff, manages the stable while I get on with training the horses and managing the business.

“She’s always happy to do whatever it takes to get the job done. She’s fantastic.

“I think we were lucky in a way in that we were able to build our stable gradually from the bottom up on our own terms.

“We came here with two horses four years ago and it has just sort of gradually got to where it is now. Because of that, we’ve been able to manage our staff, manage our client base and let things slowly develop, instead of saying, here I am, I’ve got fifty horses. What do I do now?

“It’s probably happened through good fortune as much as anything. Whatever way it has come about, it has been great.

“We’ve been approached to move to different places, but what we have established is a unique set-up and many owners find our set-back to be an attractive option.

“Yeah, that uniqueness is one of our main selling points I guess. Why would we change something that is working so well?

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