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Performance Bowls Greens the key to Bowls Club Survival

The quality and consistency of the playing surface on your green and your club’s chances of long term survival are inextricably linked, why?

Well if we consider the sport of bowls as a business for a minute it is clear, at least in the UK , that there is a vast over supply in the bowling marketplace. There simply isn’t enough demand for bowling to sustain the sheer volume of clubs that currently exist. The reasons for this are manifold and include some really “deep” factors which economists and sociologists might describe as, well… socio-economic, but the most important thing for bowling clubs to consider is that there simply aren’t enough bowlers around to make every UK bowling club economically sustainable. In other words some, maybe many, clubs will perish  in the years to come.

Of course, there are big picture issues that can be addressed and might help to improve the uptake of the game, like for instance the way bowls is marketed, and the general image of the game, perhaps more TV coverage of tournaments would help. All of that is big stuff, that can and will take a long time to bear fruit.

Meantime, if we come back to the close up view, the view out of your clubhouse window in fact, we can all start to do something this year to give our own club the greatest chance of survival; and that is tocommit to providing our members, visitors and prospective members with the best green possible to play on. This one thing is, in my opinion,  the key to growing the game again from the ground up in the years to come.

The 2 greatest barriers to the average bowling club making such a commitment are :

  1. the perceived cost and…
  2. the perceived difficulty associated with such a plan.

The key word here is “perceived” and there is good reason for that as we saw yesterday when we looked at inconsistency, traditions, desperation mode and greenkeeping myths all of which add to the perception of great expense.

If you’ve been reading my posts this week you will know that my new book Performance Bowling Greens is due to be released on this site on Monday 15th February and my major impetus for sitting down to write the book in the first place was to banish the notion that Performance Bowling Greens are prohibitively expensive and/or difficult to produce consistently.

In Performance Bowling Greens I detail a no-nonsense blueprint that you can follow to get the ultimate Performance from your Bowling Green. This really is a break with tradition (and if you read my post yesterday you will know the truth behind tradition) and a re-evaluation of how Performance Bowling Greens actually work. The book dispels all of the commonly accepted Greenkeeping Myths and moves straight to the program you must follow to achieve the highest level of performance and consistency from your green. Above all I have written the book in a way that will give you the confidence to just get on and do it.

Yesterday I shared with you my thoughts on the main reasons that clubs fall into the cycle of inconsistency and therefore perpetual disappointment with their greens. Today I would like to re-stress just how important it is that your club starts to follow a structured improvement plan aimed at producing a high performance green consistently over the long term.

When you pick up your copy of Performance Bowling Greens next Monday you will have a step by step blueprint that you can follow to turn your green around for good and start to enjoy the extra security such a green will provide for your club. The most important aspect of the book is that it details an approach that any club can take and in almost every case, it won’t only improve the green’s performance dramatically but will also return a significant financial saving to the club.

I will share a typical bowling club story with you and if you don’t recognise your own club within the story its possible that you already have a high performance bowling green.

Remember you can get your copy of Performance Bowling Greens in the shop

Where are we going as a bowls club?

Gathering the information to get a clear idea of how your club us doing now is the first step in this process and we looked at that yesterday.

Now that you are armed with that snapshot, how do you develop a vision for the future that everyone can contribute to and be happy with?

Again it comes down to taking the club apart on paper and defining how each piece will look when the new vision is realised. So for example you might want to focus on the game itself and decide that there needs to be a greater effort to move towards a performance bowling green; you might want to increase membership or widen your club’s customer base to boost the club’s finances and long term success prospects.

Whatever your long term goals and vision for the club, the final part of the puzzle is to create a plan to help you achieve your goals and I look at that in more detail here.

Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround
Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround
In this ebook we take you through a groundbreaking, step by step blueprint to save your struggling bowling club and reveal the 7 key steps that you can start taking immediately to start making a serious go of your club. more details
Price: £9.97

Don’t Ignore Your Greatest Assets

Your greatest assets?
Your greatest assets?

When asked to name their club’s greatest asset, most club members will without hesitation say “the green”.

As a green maintenance company you wouldn’t expect us to put up much of an argument against that now would you?

Well, of course the green is of major importance to all clubs, but when your club starts to take a more business focused view on management as described in Read more

Where are you with member loyalty?

Being able to discern your club’s position with regards to its member loyalty ratio can appear rather tricky if not virtually impossible sometimes. When your member or customer base is made up of disparate groups with differing interests and priorities, which of course it should be, it can be difficult to keep track of how well you are doing overall.

This, unfortunately puts a lot of clubs off trying to find out how they are doing in the eyes of their customers and they only realise things aren’t going well when its too late to do anything about it.

However, thankfully there are some tried and tested methods that can be used to achieve this goal.

Working it out

Being able to retain a loyal member base has obvious benefits and understanding member sentiment is pivotal to achieving this loyalty factor.

Taking the time to focus on understanding the level of each member’s loyalty is both prudent and beneficial to the long term health of your club. Once you have a feel for this, the club management can then take the necessary action to try to prevent potentially loyal customers from just being casual visitors.

Here are the top 4 things to seriously consider in trying to understand the club’s position within the mindset of the various member and user groups:

  1. Gather the required data to assess potential members or users reasons for making the first contact with the club or for showing an interest in a service, product or facility offered by your club.
  2. Find out if members, users and customers would be willing or even happy to introduce the club or a specific aspect of your facilities to others. This is probably one of the best measures of how well you are doing.
  3. Canvas feedback about the level of user satisfaction derived from using your products, services or facilities; and indeed, the lack of satisfaction! Armed with this information, there should also be a proactive counter action to address any negative feedback. Keep this anonymous or you wont get the truth; nobody wants to seem like a moaner! Turn negatives into positives!
  4. With the information gained from existing members and users, you can make a concerted effort to introduce the necessary improvements to your offering to further encourage the commitment of the customer to stay loyal to the club.

This article is an extract from Bowling Club Membership Retention and Growth, which builds upon the concepts of the customer or club user as discussed in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround.

Tomorrow I will introduce the concept of “a target audience”, maybe not something that comes naturally to most clubs.

What does solid tining a bowls green achieve?

This question arises a lot in my travels. Usually for one reason:

The greenkeeper is trying to follow his or her own “imagined” version of my Performance Greens Program and has distilled this down to just the “no topdressing” bit!

The slightly skewed logic then dictates that they don’t remove any plugs (cores) from the green this year due to the fact that they won’t be topdressing and will therefore leave holes that won’t be filled in and of course won’t be healed for next season.

So depending on the soil and turf conditions solid tining can be useful or not so useful.

If the green is thatchy and wet, solid tining will at best achieve nothing but at worst actually cause things to deteriorate by compacting the surface even further by creating holes with smeared edges that don’t allow water through.

On reasonably healthy greens where the underlying thatch is under control and the soil is reasonably friable, solid tining can create some good air space to allow soil microbes to thrive and to allow surface water roots and wetting agents down through the surface. It can also create a good seed bed for new seed if conditions are generally good.

I also recommend solid tining for heads and LDP affected areas prior to wetting agent application in the summer although this is usually with smaller, pencil type tines.

So overall it has its uses, but if it is merely being used to square the equation “what will we do if we aren’t top-dressing” then it is flawed logic.

On a thatchy green, there is no reason why hollow tining shouldn’t be employed even although you won’t be filling the holes afterwards.

An alternative program that actually makes a difference is discussed here.