Former Westpac executive’s initiative brings deal making back to golf’s fairways
Former Westpac executive Raj Narayan banked on a post Covid-19 thaw to return business dealing to the nation’s fairways when she set up Emajin Golf – and she hasn’t looked back.
The first time Raj Narayan picked up a golf club, she hated it.
It was 1999 and she was doing a stint at London Business School as part of her MBA.
“I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to be making all these deals on the golf course, so I’ve got to learn golf’,” she says.
While her real passion was long-distance running, including half and full marathons, she signed up for half a dozen golf lessons with a local pro at a course in London suburbia.
“There I was standing there trying to hit a stationary ball that doesn’t move. I thought ‘This is a sport where you don’t even sweat! What rubbish!’ I hated it. I totally hated it. So I gave it up.”
Eleven years later she was living in Malaysia with her husband, Sankar Narayan, a former chief financial officer of Fairfax Media, Virgin Australia, Xero, Foxtel and now the chief executive of hotel booking platform SiteMinder.
As expats, the duo were given membership of the luxurious Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club. Every day Raj would work out on the club gym’s treadmill, staring out at the surrounding fairways and greens.
It tempted her to try her hand again at the sport she had ditched a decade earlier.
“When I asked at the pro shop, this British pro told me ‘You need to have lessons for six months and then maybe you’ll be good enough to go on the golf course.’ I thought, ‘I’m not waiting six months’,” she recalls telling him.
She asked to meet the clubs’s most senior Malaysian pro, who promised he would have her on the course in six weeks. He decked her out in designer gear and shoes paired with a top set of clubs, and gave her a booklet with vouchers for 50 lessons, which she duly completed.
“He stuck to his word. In six weeks, he took me out on the golf course, where I even had a pro caddie, as you do in Asia. I was terrible to start with, but never looked back.”
During her 15-year consulting and banking career, including as chief operating officer at Westpac Private Bank, golf remained a hobby.
But she also used it as a way to connect with people, a way to do business, a way to build great relationships and connections.
In Sydney she earned the esteemed title of Women’s Captain at the NSW Golf Club and got her handicap into single figures.
“I then got involved in lots of committee and board roles in the golf space and thought, ‘Look, there’s a huge opportunity to connect golf and business’,” she says.
In January 2021, amid the thawing of the Covid pandemic, she transitioned from consultant to entrepreneur when she launched the business known as Emajin Golf, an online golf club and networking group that runs golf days at some of the top private golf courses across Australia.
“Because of the long aftermath to Covid we really only got started in July 2022, so we have essentially only been in business for two years. The silver lining of Covid was that many more people have taken up golf, more people are working remotely and face-to-face networking has returned,” she says.
Emajin now hosts more than 7500 golf enthusiasts and executives in its community, and 94 per cent of its members are C-Suite executives or business owners. Nearly 70 per cent do business with one another.
Emajin hosts three “Learn” events each month in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane where members engage with keynote speakers such as Australia Post CEO Paul Graham, Metcash Group CEO Doug Jones, Xero CCO Rachael Powell and Olympic gold medallist Natalie Cook.
“Networking is powerful when connections are made over a shared passion or interests,” Raj says.
“Emajin Golf is where the two combine.”
On the move
Raj Narayan was born in Chennai, on the Bay of Bengal in eastern India, but did most of her schooling 1350km to the northwest in Mumbai.
Her father, Mani, was the chief financial officer of a major Indian cement company and moved around the country, so the family also spent some time in Hyderabad. By the time she finished year 12, Raj had attended five different schools.
“Moving quite a bit from place to place, it pushes you out of your comfort zone, and you learn how to make friends or get along with people very quickly. So I think that is part of my personality, I’m quite extroverted, and I think a part of it comes from that environment of moving,” she says.
She will never forget her father bluntly telling she and her siblings – she has a sister named Jay and a brother named Ramesh – that “you have brown skin so you have one of four options in life – you can be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or an accountant”.
She ended up choosing the latter and studied at the University of NSW in Sydney.
But before she moved to Australia, at a wedding in India she met Sankar Narayan, then a student who was back home on a summer break from his studies at the University of Chicago.
They then both moved to Sydney in 1995, Sankar with the Boston Consulting Group.
But Raj’s father, being deeply conservative by nature, insisted that they be married if they were living together. So they returned to Raj’s home town of Chennai for the wedding.
1000 people attended the extravaganza, staged in one of the city’s glamorous wedding halls. The festivities went for five days.
“I always say that our marriage is very good, but the actual wedding was horrid! I think in most Indian weddings, everybody has fun except the bride and groom,” Raj quips.
“I always used to joke that this is how they keep the divorce rate low in India, because nobody can go through it again. Sankar knew 70 people at the wedding and I knew about 150 people. The rest we had never met before.”
Career-focused
Raj and her husband, who have both pursued corporate careers simultaneously in Australia, share the traits of being career-focused, driven, hardworking people. They only spent a year in Kuala Lumpur, where Sankar worked for the media firm Astro All Asia, before returning to Sydney
“Sankar is my biggest supporter. I’m his biggest supporter. So we kind of work independently and autonomously, but we know that one is always there for the other,” she says.
They talk so often about business that there is a whiteboard in the Narayan household in Sydney, which is rarely left untouched.
Most recently, it has been worked over for the benefit of their daughter, 21-year-old Tara, who for the past two years has been studying politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) at Oxford University.
“We love discussing things and we love writing on the whiteboard. Right now my daughter is working on an economics project, so there we were the other day writing on the white board about it,” Raj quips with a wide smile.
“We are very supportive of our daughter and we push her, but in a very good way. We want her to be successful and she is quite a driven individual.”
Raj remains deeply close to her family. Her mother, Swarna, is in good health and travels regularly between Sydney and New York, where her other daughter works for global financial ratings house Standard & Poors. Raj’s brother works at retail giant Scentre Group in Sydney.
Without fail, Raj calls her sister each morning and her mother every evening.
“My mother is a very smart, intelligent lady. She was a housewife for many years and she has been so supportive of all of us. I think she’s just one of those people who’s always been a giver. She looks after everyone.“
Tragically Raj lost her father in 2019 after his battle with prostate cancer. He was 81.
“He was one of those people who never went to the doctors. He was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer when he first found out there was something wrong with him, and was given about six weeks to live, which was devastating for everybody,” she recalls.
“But then he actually ended up living for two years because of the drugs he was on, which maintained his quality of life until the end. I used to visit him nearly every day.”
She says her greatest learning from her father is believing in the supernatural source of justice commonly known as karma.
“I’m quite superstitious,” she says proudly. “Dad was a man of principle. He believed in being honest and doing the right thing. That is the big thing he instilled in all of us. So for me, I think that if you always do the right thing by everybody and when you put good vibes into the universe, the good is going to come back to you. I genuinely believe that.”
There are a number of social golf clubs in Australia where you can get a handicap and generally pursue a pathway to playing golf if you are not a member of a club.
“The difference with Emajin Golf is we are a business networking group. We are not a social golf group. You don’t join Emajin to go play golf at some nice private courses. It is a business networking group,” Raj declares.
On November 15 Emajin staged a breakfast at Victoria Golf Club in Melbourne, ahead of the Australian Open tournament being staged at the same course at the end of the month. It gave members a chance to not only play the course but to hear from golfer Nick O’Hern, who spoke on the topic of “Strengthening your Mentality: in Golf & in Business”.
Expansion plans
He also ran a putting masterclass and played a hole with each group of the more than 60 Emajin members, largely business owners and executives, who took to the course after his presentation.
“We are in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane at the moment, but our goal is to grow globally. So definitely Asia – Japan, Korea and Vietnam – and definitely the US. We’d love to grow the brand globally because that’s where the scale is,” says Raj, adding that the time horizon for the expansion is over the next three to five years.
It will require capital beyond her own, which is currently the sole source of funding for the business.
“In the future, absolutely at some point we will need to seek external capital,” she says.
While she lost her father five years ago, she continues to live by another of his life mottos: There is no such thing as a magic pill for success, which only comes to those who work longer and harder than anyone else.
She also reckons he would have forgiven her by now for leaving the accounting profession.
“Look as a young person, I don’t think he would have been happy with me starting a golf business,” she quips with a grin.
“But seriously, he was one of those old school dads who always supported us and always pushed us to strive to do our best.
“I say the same to my daughter now. As long as you achieve your personal best, whatever it may be, you’ve done well.”
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