In 2013, Martin Slumbers was at a crossroads. Following a successful finance career that had begun in the early 1980s, he spent around a decade involved in much more strategic, operational work, but started to feel that it was time to step back.

“It was becoming more of a young man’s game,” he says. “So I decided to retire and focus on playing golf to as high a standard as possible. I’d already whittled my handicap down to a very low, single figure, so I wanted to see if I could play amateur golf at an international level. I was quite happy to wrap up a career of 30-plus years in the City and overseas. It felt like a natural end.”

However, that outlook soon changed. Whether Slumbers’ passion for golf had some sort of manifesting effect on what happened next is anyone’s guess, but it is rather uncanny.

“I quickly found that I missed work and needed to get back to it,” he says. “Then, right out of the blue, I received a call from a headhunter asking me to interview for the role of Secretary of The Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews and CEO of The R&A, the sport’s governing body for everywhere in the world outside the US and Mexico. I was very taken aback. It’s not a role that I ever thought I’d get, and I had no contacts there whatsoever.”

Dynamic drivers

Slumbers was not lacking in organisational experience, however. After studying engineering and economics at the University of Birmingham, Slumbers had moved to London in 1981 to take up an accountancy training contract at what was then PriceWaterhouse & Co.

Not long after qualifying, he left the firm to join the City wing of US investment bank Salomon Brothers. Building his career from bank reconciliations upwards, Slumbers worked there until 1998, by which time he had served a three-year stint as the bank’s CFO in Hong Kong.

“That was fantastic,” he says. “I loved Asia, and thought I was going to be out there for the foreseeable future.”

However, he was sent back to the UK to be its London CFO. He then left to join Deutsche Bank, which had recently bought Morgan Grenfell with the ambition of becoming a global investment bank, so Slumbers came in as CFO of their sales and trading business. He worked there for 15 years and ended up running a division called Global Business Services, which handled all the bank’s back-office functions. In around 2003 or 2004, he went into more operational work.

Handling the club

That track record of international strategic work has underpinned Slumbers’ key achievements at The R&A. Firstly, he notes, it was important to evolve its commercial model in a way that would harness golf’s direction of travel as a business. Social media and other digital technologies were already shifting public perceptions of the sport when Slumbers became CEO. 

In tandem, branding, sponsorship and other commercial partnerships were growing steadily more influential. Plus, of the world’s four major golf championships, The Open at St Andrews is the only one based outside the US. The pressure to compete with the Stateside tournaments was increasing. “That’s why it was useful for someone from the business world to step in,” he says.

Slumbers sought to make the organisation more global. “We have more people on the ground now in the Asia Pacific region, but we’ve also built a sizeable presence in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. 

It’s not easy – Slumbers is typically away from home 150 to 200 nights per year. “It’s a big commitment. But getting out there and expanding recruitment really helps to narrow the distance between St Andrews and everywhere else.”

Slumbers counts his third major achievement as reframing golf as a game for all. “We’ve taken huge steps to encourage people who’ve never played to get involved,” he says. “We merged with the Ladies’ Golf Union to support the efforts of women and girls not just to play the sport, but to develop business careers in it, too.” 

The organisation created scholarships and training programmes to get more women and girls all over the world working in the sport, and launched the golfers with disability championships, The G4D Open. Outside the US and Mexico, around 62 million people consume the game. “On a purely recreational level, it’s becoming younger, and more gender diverse.”

Changing course

Over the summer, Slumbers was awarded an OBE in the King’s Birthday Honours for Services to Golf. The news surprised him even more than his original invitation to interview for The R&A.

“I was totally and utterly stunned,” he says. “It was immensely humbling, as I realised I was being rewarded for something that a lot of people had helped to deliver. And the look on my mother’s face when I told her was worth every moment of my time here.”

Slumbers credits his accountancy background for providing a solid foundation not just for his work in business, but his leadership of The R&A, too. “The training equips you to be a process thinker and to analyse complex problems in a logical way. In fact, I’d say that the more complex a problem is, the more effective I am, because I break things down.”

Slumbers is now coming to the end of his time at The R&A, with Mark Darbon, CEO of English rugby side Northampton Saints, set to take over in December. However, he notes: “I still love working, so I’m going to build a portfolio of non-executive directorships. Some will be in business, but I’ll also look at sports and charities. Sport is one of the few forces with the power to genuinely change society, and I’m excited for more young people to take part.

“I’m also going to play a bit more golf.”