Equestrian centre owner

Kelsall Hill's Phil Latham on the highs and lows of running events, and the time he “kidnapped” Rishi Sunak

- As told to Lauren Williamson

I'd like to have a typical day but every day is different.

You never know what surprises are around the corner. My day starts at 7am with a coffee and a chat with the outside team. That could be setting up for dressage, showjumping or maintaining the facilities.

Prioritising is tricky: there might be 15 jobs on the list, but only time for five.

We started with a 6.5-mile farm ride in 2004, when Kelsall Hill was a working dairy farm. The next year we added an outdoor arena and began converting cattle sheds into stables. Locals suggested we run British Eventing (BE) and by 2010 we were lucky to have Mark Phillips as our course-designer. He didn't want people schooling over the BE course, so we added a schooling field and a gallop.

We started with a 6.5-mile farm ride in 2004, when Kelsall Hill was a working dairy farm. The next year we added an outdoor arena and began converting cattle sheds into stables. Locals suggested we run British Eventing (BE) and by 2010 we were lucky to have Mark Phillips as our course-designer. He didn't want people schooling over the BE course, so we added a schooling field and a gallop.

We've been running BE twice a year since 2006, now with international classes in the spring and national in the autumn. My chart to deliver BE is 16 weeks long – you start four months out and work backwards: have we got the right number of jumps, red and white flags, enough sets of letters? Have we started conversations with sponsors? Catering? If you leave it until two weeks before, it's chaos.