The magnificent Goodwood House and grounds. (inset) Lord March and his wife welcome car fanatic and actor Tom Cruise to Goodwood. (Right) Hound Lodge prepares to welcome guests
both in terms of innovation in the content and the development of the whole experience. That is what keeps people coming back.”
G
oodwood likes to say it owns a number of weekends of the British summer season. First,
the Festival of Speed at the end of June. That rolls into horse racing’s Qatar Goodwood Festival – popularly known as Glorious Goodwood – and then onto classic motorsport at the Revival, the closing of the summer season, which is in the middle of September. In addition to that, they’ve added what they consider to be the opening of the motorsport season – the Members’ Meeting – which is at the beginning of March. All of these things added together bring around
600,000 people to the estate. Williamson is certain that his prior experience as finance director helped him when he moved up to the top role at Goodwood. “Being FD was hugely important,” he confirms. “When there is such a fine balance between success and failure – and the strength of your balance sheet is almost irrelevant because it’s not liquid and, although you have all of these assets, you are not going to sell them – you have to have a really strong financial diligence about you in order to make good decisions. I think we now have a good balance between being brave, taking bold decisions and also keeping the business on track so when Lord March’s son Charlie inherits the estate he is in an even stronger position than his father was when he inherited.”
‘ Our customers sit at the centre of everything we do. Our attention to detail and delivering small twists that our customers notice and appreciate is the most important thing’
46 DIRECTOR OF FINANCE
Goodwood as a whole contributes
around £245m to the UK economy each year, a figure which clearly delights Williamson. “We are very proud about that because estates have, by tradition, been all about their community,” he says. “It’s about providing housing, jobs, food and so, in a modern sense, we are continuing to take that very seriously. A lot of the ways we invest in the content of our events is done through local communities. For instance, Littlehampton Welding, a company down on the south coast, has recently won an international award for sculpture with the work it has done for the Festival of Speed. “Rolls Royce produces all of its cars for the world on the estate aſter Lord March persuaded them that being in England was good for them. They associate with Goodwood because they need to cement in people’s mind that they are a perfectly made English motor car and they bring their customers here all the time to demonstrate that.”
Williamson knows that the estate must
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