Doing, not talking: Tackling the staff crisis that grips the industry

Cover image courtesy of Three Bridges Thoroughbreds

A little over 14 months ago, in April 2021, a congregation of racing’s heavy hitters met at Royal Randwick for the Australian Thoroughbred Workforce Development Forum. At its core was a robust discussion on the staff crisis that is choking racing and breeding.

Chris Waller was there, admitting no one was knocking on his door for a job, as was Ciaron Maher, Lindy Maurice, Vin Cox and John Messara. Greg Nichols and Myles Foreman were also there from Racing Australia, each of them among 80 total participants across two days.

From Magic Millions, Katie Page had a stiff warning to anyone that was listening. If 2021 was bad, she said, just wait until 2022 and, in the 14 months since, she's been largely right.

COVID’s chokehold has constricted an already thinly spread labour force, and none of it has been helped by the closures of international borders which, for the best of two years, has removed a huge slab of seasonal workers.

Without travellers, backpackers and seasonal tourism, private enterprise has struggled, from stud farms to coffee shops.

While smaller farms have just about kept their heads above water, larger farms have felt it too. There have been more and more dispersal sales to make stock numbers manageable, and racing stables are still singing out for track riders and stable staff.

It’s become an immemorial conversation, one that is dominating racing’s radio shows and digital platforms right now, and the overwhelming response is that people need solutions now. They’re getting tired of talking about it, and one such person is Toby Liston of Three Bridges Thoroughbreds.

Love for the animal?

The Three Bridges masthead is a couple of generations old these days. It’s a family business, run by the Listons in the country Victorian surrounds of the Eddington township.

The laws of economics say that established businesses are often able to weather the hard times well, and this is the case for Three Bridges. But as Toby Liston will tell you, his farm has far from skated through.

“We used to have a lot more horses,” he said, speaking to TDN AusNZ. “Now, for me, the only way to get better and do well is to shrink the operation, to have less horses of greater quality, and that seems to be working. And it’s more enjoyable for everybody.”

In its earlier days, Three Bridges was a bigger operation. The stock numbers were much higher and the annual cycle of breeding, foaling, rearing and selling was huge. Liston said it was exhausting, to the point of it not being viable.

“In the old days, you’d work 12 days straight with two days off,” he said. “You’d get one day to sleep and one day to shop, and then you were back at it. Our staff didn’t have a life, and staff need a life.”

Farm work, traditionally, is an exhaustive lifestyle. It’s long days with no respect for weekends, public holidays and Christmas, but Liston said when it comes to horses, so much of the obligations on staff are driven by passion alone. He said it’s not sustainable.

“A love for the animal is not enough,” he said. “That’s what attracts staff to the game, but at the end of the day they need a life. We were burning out our staff, and we were burning out ourselves too but, as the business owner, you do it because you don’t have any other option.

“Staff, on the other hand, actually get a choice, and these days they’re making those choices around lifestyle and flexibility.”

For Liston, something had to give.

He had constant staff shortages and headaches around manning the farm adequately. His hours were getting longer and longer, and time with his children shorter and shorter. He admits he was irritable and unpleasant half the time, and so he made two significant changes.

The first was reducing the farm down to fewer horses, with a greater concentration on quality bloodlines, and the second was the staff working week. It shrunk from six or seven days to a strict, five-day roster.

The five-day working week

It sounds like a simple fix, creating a five-day working week. But as anyone in small business will testify, wrangling days off in a small team isn’t easy.

Nevertheless, Liston approached it as a means to an end.

“We changed to a five-day work week and it’s certainly helped with retention,” he said. “We kicked it off about two to three years ago and it’s gone down really well, and they come back to work happier because it’s a more enjoyable workplace. Even looking to the future, we might make it a four-day work week to try to attract more people.”

The bones of the arrangement are that staff weekends are either Friday and Saturday or Saturday and Sunday. Staff get to choose which option suits them, and Liston works it out according to what’s best for the farm.

“Our farm is never different,” he said. “We feed horses twice a day, every day, whether it’s a weekend or weekday. The same amount of work needs to be done, so the staff are aware that there might be more work to do on the days where there are less people on, and we plan ahead while we have the numbers.

“As an example, all our staff overlap on certain days. Everyone is here on a Tuesday and everyone is here on a Thursday, so we do more of the internal hard work together while we’re all here. On the weekends, there are fewer people and we work around that.”

The whole thing has become a well-oiled machine at Three Bridges.

During yearling time, the team will gut the stables on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and they’ll use those days to book dentists or host training days. It’s a system that the farm staff have come to know well, and it’s given Liston considerable peace of mind in these rugged times.

“To this day, we’ve kept a lot of the staff that were around when we started this five-day week,” he said. “A lot of the new staff that come through think they work hard now, but they have no idea how hard it used to be.”

Retaining, upskilling

These days, Three Bridges is home to around 80 broodmares, down from the figure that it used to be. It has around 40 weanlings and the same number in racing stock, all on 1200 acres with four family members at the helm and a staff count of four, give or take.

“The staff crisis has changed the way we think about our business,” Liston said. “It had to. I’ve been 17 years setting up Three Bridges, and staff recruitment and retention is something that we’ve faced for 17 years.

“We’ll put out an ad for staff now and get no applications, and the frustrating thing is that everyone is in the same boat. But that doesn’t make you feel better. We needed to change something, and we did.”

Liston has worked with multiple business coaches over the years. He said the overwhelming feedback was that staff wanted training and avenues for advancement. It’s not always easy to provide that in a small-farm environment, but Liston is doing his best.

One of his key staff members is Reid Murray, a young graduate of Lindy Maurice’s Thoroughbred Industry Careers (TIC) program.

While Three Bridges consigned all its yearlings to the Gold Coast this January, it ‘adopted out’ Murray to bloodstock agent Craig Rounsefell for the Melbourne yearling sales, while Murray tagged along with Paul Willetts across the weanling circuit.

“Any external training actually benefits us because they come back with more knowledge, and they’re hungrier,” he said. “They’ve seen the industry from a different angle, and because we’re small and flexible, we can give our staff opportunities that they might not get elsewhere.”

This last part is a critical piece of thinking when it comes to the retention and upskilling of existing staff.

According to Liston, smaller farms have the advantage of being able to spread staff around the various skills required. Because the team is smaller, individuals have to be across foaling, weaning, yearling prep or farm maintenance.

He said that the very large farms can pigeon hole themselves because staff are expected to remain in a specific department, be it stallions or yearlings, for example.

“And look, we know that we’re not the end place that people want to be,” Liston said. “But the more training we can instill in staff, and the more they learn about all the parts of the business, the more they’ll want to belong and the longer they’ll stay.”

No incentive to grow

Speaking to Toby Liston, you learn pretty quickly that talking isn’t the same as doing. The Three Bridges studmaster gets things done, as much because of personal ambition as downright necessity.

“I have four young kids,” he said. “A horse stud is not a good place to bring up kids because it’s 24/7. You don’t stop and I’m mindful of that, and the only way for me to be a good father is to see my kids, so to do that I have to empower others to do my job.”

For many businesses in racing and breeding, this is easier said than done. COVID, especially, has shown that.

Editorials and radio programs regularly shout the frustrations of everyone, but yard staff are still going to work at 3am, and rural farms are still battling to get replies to job postings.

Readdressing racetrack opening times might ease some of the problems. It might make the job more attractive, as would more money, more formal qualifications across the industry (which is happening) and a better social perception of the sport itself. But it won’t cure everything, according to Liston.

“Internationals come in and they want to work,” he said. “But I find in Australia that people just generally don’t want to work, especially in these physical, labour-intensive jobs. They all want to be a bloodstock agent but very few want to get a base anymore, so the more mundane jobs aren’t sought-after by young people these days.”

Liston won’t ask his staff to do anything he won’t do. He mucks out, loads horses, cuts grass and gets dirty. Still, he’s feeling the pinch.

“The 40,000 internationals that used to turn up for all industries, they’re just not there anymore,” he said. “That might start to change now, but as things currently stand, we’ve got a five-year sponsored visa from Europe that we still can’t find anyone to fill.”

The staff ratio at Three Bridges Thoroughbreds is the lowest it’s ever been. Liston said there are other things too that make it incredibly hard to be successful. He mentions Work Cover, which he says has removed so much of an employer’s rights.

“For me, it just feels like there is no incentive to grow and get bigger in Australia,” he said. “That’s a frustrating thing because if you do get bigger, it’s more issues, more challenges, more headaches. I just can’t see the point in growing, even though our business could be double the size that it is.”

If it’s a depressing outlook, it’s only part of the overall outlook. Three Bridges has ticked away for a long time, and it’s supported by good and loyal clients with plenty of success.

However, Liston still has to get up each morning and face the same issues as the rest of the industry, and he said there wouldn’t be a farm in Australia not affected by the current staff crisis.

His five-day working week has been a huge step towards tackling it, and it’s been a success. If nothing else, it’s been a start.