November 2004 - Alex Phillips - yachtswoman

There can be few business women who can boast gaining their business experience from negotiating 50-foot waves and living on freeze-dried food for 38 days! However, Alex Phillips, Andover Women in Business Club’s enthralling speaker for November, is one such lady.

Illustrating her talk with video footage of sensational waves and atrocious weather conditions around Cape Horn, Alex described her experiences as skipper of ‘Quadstone’, a 45-ton, 72-foot steel yacht, during the 2000/01 BT Global Challenge. With 17 years experience as a professional yacht skipper and 140,000 miles at sea ‘under her belt’, Alex was chosen to skipper one of 12 identical yachts for what is arguably the world’s toughest yacht race.

Alex Philips (l) with Tessa Makepeace and Gillian Fifield

With a crew of 17 to work with, 60% of whom had never sailed before (but all who had invested £27,000 to take part), Alex’s challenge was not a small one. With a male and female crew selected from around the world, of all ages and from all walks of life, the ability to lead the team to success was a vast challenge.

With proven leadership and development skills, which she now uses in the corporate world, Alex used her skills to bring together a team who worked well together, respected each other for their individual talents and could maintain cordial relationships for the 10-months duration of the race.

“It was by far the toughest thing I have ever done” says Alex, who has mixed feelings about her ‘retirement’ from such adventuring. “I have always loved sailing, but the opportunity to earn a living on dry land, using the skills I have gained in the past, is an attractive one for the time being!”

Living on freeze-dried food for 10 months and having to maintain an intake of 6,000 calories a day for the demands of the Southern Ocean legs of the race, was hard going. “The demands on the crew physically were enormous at those times” says Alex. “Even on those high calorie diets, we all still lost weight during those times!” Trying to provide a varied diet was difficult, but food was only a small part of the extensive research that Alex had to undertake prior to the race. Discussions with skippers who had undertaken the challenge previously provided much of the protection against likely pitfalls and preparation work was seemingly endless.

Despite the complications of getting 17 people together from across the globe, the crew met for the first time in January 2000. Together they formulated a Team Goal - to achieve a Top 3 place in each of the legs of the race and together they wrote their ‘Team Bible’ – a book of rules for everyone to follow throughout their time together.

After an emotional start to the race, setting off in thick fog from Southampton on 10 th September 2000, “Quadstone” won the first leg, arriving in Boston ahead of all other yachts. Alex believes that their achievements throughout the remainder of the race were due to the crew having different strengths to draw on. Leadership is all about people, using their individual skills to motivate the whole team to work well together. There can be no doubt about Alex’s ability to achieve such motivations and she is now in great demand throughout the country, delivering motivations and leadership training in the corporate world. A great admirer of Sir Peter Blake, Alex was keen to quote him - “Obstacles are what you see when you take your mind off the goal”. Andover Women in Business Club is honoured to have had the opportunity to hear her speak.