Sales week notes from Tattersalls.

Newmarket during sales week is an unusual place. The town doubles in population overnight, and almost everyone in it is either selling, buying, advising on, or transporting horses.

This was our first October Yearling Sales operating in any meaningful capacity in Newmarket, and the lessons came thick and fast. Some predictable. Some not.

The first lesson: timing is non-negotiable

Sales week runs to a published schedule, but the actual movements happen around the schedule rather than according to it. Buyers want to inspect a particular yearling at 7:30 in the morning before the catalogue opens, then be at the sales paddocks by 9, in a Bedford Lodge meeting at 11:30, back at Tattersalls for the afternoon session, and at a stud farm fifteen miles away for early evening — all without knowing in advance how the morning will run.

What that meant for our operation was something closer to a corporate roadshow than an airport-transfer service. The chauffeur effectively becomes an extension of the buyer’s logistics team. Pre-load the next two destinations. Listen for the schedule changes. Have the car positioned correctly for the next move while the client is in the previous meeting. Don’t ask twice.

The second lesson: discretion has limits

Bloodstock is, in many ways, a small industry. A chauffeur in Newmarket sales week sees and hears more in three days than they do in the rest of the quarter. We had assumed, correctly as it turned out, that NDAs would be requested. We had not anticipated quite how seriously they would be taken — or how often we would be asked to confirm, on the spot, that we did not also have another buyer in our diary that week. (We did not. Strict separation of concurrent clients during sales weeks is now a published policy.)

The third lesson: the journeys are longer than they look

On a map, the Newmarket-to-Stansted run is forty-five minutes. During sales week, the same drive can take an hour and twenty — not because of motorway traffic, but because every horsebox in East Anglia appears to be using the same B-roads simultaneously. We have learned to add a buffer.

What we did right

Pre-positioning the car. Pre-loading three or four destinations into the navigation in advance, so the chauffeur could move on a moment’s notice. Bottled water and the right pastries from the right bakery in the back. NDAs and appropriate vehicle separation. Most of all, keeping the chauffeur on the same client all week — one familiar face, one phone number, one source of continuity in what is otherwise a deeply intense seven days.

What we’ll do differently next time

Add a second vehicle on standby for the busiest two days. Build the Bedford Lodge ↔ Tattersalls run into a published fixed-rate route for sales week clients. And start taking bookings for July Sale considerably earlier than we did this time round.

Sales week is, frankly, the closest a chauffeur service in this part of the country gets to a London financial roadshow in intensity — and we now treat it accordingly.

— The team at Cavendish