Win or lose, the pressure stays on

By SELWYN PARKER

Any chief executive who thinks his or her job is a hot seat should try changing places with Trevor McKewen. He's the boss of the Vodafone Auckland Warriors, a company with an annual turnover of $10 million. Here is a brief summary of some of his pressures.

The main shareholder, the Tainui tribe, is bleeding financially, is in disarray, and is trying to sell. But then you never know with Tainui. After all, none of the tribe turned up to a meeting last week with the National Rugby League's chief executive, David Moffett, about the future of their investment.

The media are practically predicting receivership and openly speculating whether the Warriors can even pay staff.

Prospective purchasers are doing due diligence but it is uncertain whether the Yes Group, which has stuck its hand up, is really one buyer or two.

Because the team has struggled (second-last in the competition this season), revenue has slumped. Average gates at home this season were 12,000, half of the Warriors' debut year in the NRL.

Sometimes it seems that half the key staff are crippled. Star employees such as fullback Ivan Cleary, hired to replace Matthew Ridge, and halfback Stacey Jones were off work for months with broken bodies.

"In Cleary's case, it was like a top chief financial officer you've hired to rehabilitate the business financially but who can't work for 10 months of the year," explains Mr McKewen.

So why is this man smiling? Well, he has a plan, more of which later.

Running the Warriors is clearly not a job susceptible to classic management techniques.

Or, as Mr McKewen puts it: "This is very different from your average boardroom."

So perhaps it does not matter that Mr McKewen's prior work experience is also unusual. An apprentice mechanic on the Gold Coast ("hated it; left as soon as I was out"), he then spent 15 happy years in sports journalism, including a period as the highly regarded founding sports editor of the Sunday Star-Times, and four years in Sydney with Rupert Murdoch's cut-throat News Corp as the media manager during what is universally known as the "league wars" over ownership of the game.

Not an ideal preparation for this particular hot seat, you may think.

But that's because you are not Mr McKewen.

"A perfect apprenticeship," he explains. "As a sports journalist, I spent 15 years observing administrative stuff-ups in sport; 15 years of seeing how not to do it."

So here he is, headhunted into this grisly position in October 1998, and trying to save the business. What's the game plan?

While trying to keep all the short-term balls in the air, Mr McKewen is pinning what he says will be a prosperous and winning future for the Warriors on long-term strategies.

As he explains it, Mr McKewen's (and chain-smoking coach Mark Graham's) problem is employees, quality thereof.

The player pool on which the Warriors is able to draw lacks the cutting edge competitiveness of the Aussies and is further hampered by poorer quality coaching and development structures in comparison with the aggressive Australian clubs.

No less than 300 junior teams compete every weekend in Parramatta alone, and every one of the players wants to become an Eels star.

Then there's rugby. "We can't compete with the mana of the 1st XV," laments Mr McKewen, citing a string of All Blacks who started out playing league.

"The players who stay in this game stay because they love rugby league.

"Of the pool of gifted athletes in New Zealand, rugby gets 90 per cent and league gets 10 per cent."

To widen the pool, the Warriors are working with the Auckland and New Zealand rugby league organisations to boost player numbers, improve development systems, provide financial incentives and establish a domestic version of Australia's reserve grade.

They are the only NRL club that meets the official $A3.25 million ($4.1 million) salary cap for players. And head office staffing has been trimmed 30 per cent in the last 18 months.

"The salary cap should be $A2 million, not $A3.25 million," adds Mr McKewen. "The players are getting too much money for the revenue coming into the game."

The Warriors' profits depend crucially on 80 minutes a week.

"We can either cut costs, which we've done, or we can increase revenue," explains Mr McKewen. "And we can only increase revenue if the team are performing."

If the Warriors string together a few wins, gate-takings soar at Ericsson Stadium. If they are losing badly, that is another $100,000 or so off revenue.

Sitting in the stands, watching the fortunes of the business ebb and flow with every missed tackle, Mr McKewen is helpless.

"You feel powerless. You get frustrated when you see players treating a defeat lightly.

"And you get frustrated when a referee makes a mistake. One crucial refereeing error can affect our balance sheet by hundreds of thousands of dollars."

There are strong arguments that say the Warriors will survive. First, it has strong sponsors in Vodafone, Bartercard and DB. Second, it is New Zealand's NRL side, not just a side representing a Sydney suburb.

Third, television sources say the Warriors deliver $8 million of TV revenue a year to the NRL, much more than any other side.

And fourth, a handful of other NRL clubs are in at least as much financial difficulty. According to NRL sources, the Melbourne Storm have lost $A6.5 million in the past two years and several other clubs are propped up by a News Corp subsidiary, just as Tainui have propped up the Warriors.

And Mr McKewen is duly grateful. "It's not for me to say whether Tainui should have invested in rugby league or not," he says diplomatically. "But this club would have gone under two years ago if they hadn't. Tainui were the only people who put their hands up."

That raises the issue of ownership, in which Mr McKewen is, once again, largely powerless. But he's still smiling. He loves this game. To an outsider, it seems the Warriors are for their chief executive more of a crusade than a business.

* Selwyn Parker is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz