Written In The Stars – Sam Hayes on dynasties, succession and forging your own path

In the conversation around a leader’s lasting value being measured in succession, Colin Hayes is resting in peace. But so too is his oldest son, Peter Hayes.

In 2001, just 52 years old, Peter was killed after climbing into a light aircraft with a mind to buy it, the small plane crashing south of Mildura, killing him and the pilot next to him. He died as he had lived, chasing boundlessness.

“Dad was like that,” says Sam Hayes, who was 26 when his father died. He tells The Straight that Peter was unusual for his vintage. And unusual for a Hayes.

“He loved flying and he loved riding push bikes. He also loved yoga when yoga wasn’t really a thing, so at the time that he died he’d been setting himself up for a pretty long life. He was healthy and he was active, so it was quite shocking.”

In articles over the years covering the dynamic between Peter Hayes and his behemoth father, Colin Hayes, much has been written about their differences: that they were ‘oil and water’, that Peter wanted freedom from the shackles of his father. That he lived first and worked later.

In fact, Sam remembers his father working six-and-a-half days a week instead of seven.

“I don’t remember having a lot of spare time with Dad when I was growing up,” he says. “He worked a lot and he worked very hard, whether it was at Lindsay Park or at Oakbank (as a public trainer).

“He was different from Colin in that he didn’t shy away from taking a holiday during the year, which was foreign to Colin. I don’t think Colin ever wanted a week off work or time away, so it’s probably been made more of in articles than it was in real life.”

Peter’s younger brother, David Hayes, was better-wired from the get-go to take over.

“David was more gregarious than Dad. David had more aspirations to run a big empire within the industry, a big business like Lindsay Park, whereas Dad was happier with a small outfit at Oakbank, doing his own thing and being his own boss,” he says.

Inevitably, Peter Hayes didn’t get the keys to Lindsay Park. When he died in 2001, he was in the role of caretaker trainer at the famous family-run outfit, while his younger brother David was in Hong Kong.

“Dad was content with Colin’s choices because he knew they were perfect for Colin,” Sam says. “Dad’s thinking was that we all have to spend time on our passions, and if your passion is work, just work. But if you’ve got other interests, don’t ignore those just to work.”

Sam isn’t far off the age his father was when he was killed. Until about three years ago, he was the master of Cornerstone Stud, the old Lindsay Park in Angaston, South Australia.

But in 2023, he ended a 60-year Hayes family association with that land, selling Cornerstone outright to his business partner, John Frankhuisen. Midlife, he took a leap much like his father might have and co-established TOOP+TOOP Rural, a high-end real estate branch covering rural South Australia.

“I didn’t think that I was going to work in racing,” Sam says. “In fact, growing up I was pretty sure I wouldn’t. I just never had an interest in being a hands-on horse person, and I was actually allergic to horses.

“So back in the ‘90s I went off and worked in the wine industry, which was one of the biggest agricultural industries then. I loved all things ag and that was where I landed until it took something pretty tragic for me to start thinking about the family business.”

That tragedy was the sudden death of Peter, which set a chain of events in motion. David eventually returned from Hong Kong, relocated Lindsay Park to Euroa in Victoria, and Sam took up at Cornerstone Stud.

They were lean years, at times. They were the best of years, but also the worst.

“I loved living on the farm. I loved travelling to sales. I loved the challenge of trying to breed a really good horse and selling top-priced yearlings, and I miss all that,” he said.

“But I don’t miss trying to make wages every week, or the stress of trying to grow a business in a shrinking market. I was very parochial about South Australia and didn’t want to move, but most of the broodmare and stallion business had moved to the Hunter Valley and Victoria, and I was stubborn.”

Sam says there’s a fine line between stubbornness and persistence. In the beginning, he was the latter, but towards the end, he was the former, and it did him no favours. Cornerstone, as he had it, wasn’t firing.

“I woke up to it, in the end,” he says. “I made a change at a point where I could give myself a really nice retirement with 10 to 15 years in another industry. I stepped away (Frankhuisen owns 100 per cent of Cornerstone now) with no idea what I would be doing next.

“But they say you can’t cross the chasm in two small jumps, so I just had to take a run-up and jump, not really knowing what was going to be on the other side.”

That, without doubt, is the Peter Hayes in Sam Hayes.

It’s also the reason why this branch of Hayes succession is a success too, entirely separate from the more heralded, much more written-about Lindsay Park.

“But there’s not much scrutiny about being a Hayes anymore,” Sam says. “I remember it more in primary school, to be honest. There’s a lot of competition for newspaper space these days, and racing doesn’t hold the same appeal that it did in the ‘70s and ‘80s, so that’s probably why.”

At TOOP+TOOP Rural, Sam is an agent in premium rural and agribusiness sales, from farms to feed mills and wineries. He lives in the Adelaide Hills, which is just about the limit of how urban he’s willing to be.

It might be a Hayes inheritance, but he is gregarious and warm as a real estate agent with a working history of working a room and a crowd. He even has the same agelessness in his voice as many of the Hayes men do.

“But I don’t miss trying to make wages every week, or the stress of trying to grow a business in a shrinking market. I was very parochial about South Australia and didn’t want to move, but most of the broodmare and stallion business had moved to the Hunter Valley and Victoria, and I was stubborn.” – Sam Hayes

Like Peter, however, he throws favour to doing what he loves, and he lends an ear to inspired thinking, propelled by a random encounter he had in around 1999 with the Canadian ice hockey legend, Wayne Gretzky.

“Wayne was sitting across the aisle from me on a flight to Canada and he heard my accent when I was ordering food,” Sam says. “I didn’t know who he was at first, but all these Canadians were coming up to get his autograph because we were flying into Toronto and the plane was full of Canadians.

“He started asking me about AFL and the Australian players and football, and what the house was worth in Melbourne. He was amazing, and I ended up getting our wine into his chain of restaurants.”

At that time, Sam was working for BRL Hardy Wine, and for three years was its marketing coordinator for Canada. Departing that flight, he asked Gretzky for any tips for a guy starting out.

“He’s quite famous for saying this now, but he said, ‘Sam, you miss one hundred per cent of the shots you don’t take’.”

Sam Hayes took that input of wisdom, typed it out, laminated it and pinned it to the wall of his shower. He’s like that, reading affirmations first thing in the morning.

“I like thinking positive things and believing in yourself,” he says. “I think in your late ’40s, to be changing careers, you have to.

“We weren’t starting (TOOP+TOOP Rural) with a big bank. I didn’t have a whole lot of capital to invest in a new business, but losing a bit of money is one thing. Lose confidence and that’s very hard to get back. Thankfully I managed to maintain that belief, which has helped me out in this next part of my career.”

Sam doesn’t have a bad word to say about succession or the weight of expectation in a family as famous as the Hayes.

“Succession is really interesting,” he says. “In business, people tend to hand over to their kids much earlier than, say, what can happen in racing. Kids can be in their 50s and 60s before it happens, which doesn’t give them a long run at it.

“There was zero expectations for me and my siblings to go into the racing industry, and it was made very clear that we would be good at what we were interested in. But we loved trying to work out how to win in life and business, and that, genetically, was very much imprinted on me.”

Peter Hayes led Lindsay Park from 1996 through to his death in 2001, during which the operation won four Melbourne and five Adelaide trainers’ premierships. He was no stand-in.

As the next generation of the Hayes dynasty has built success in Victoria, it would be easy to skip over that chapter of the story. But Sam Hayes’ own journey is a tribute to his father’s lasting impact.