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Author: John

Master Greenkeeper John Quinn is the author of Performance Bowling Greens, and several other titles on Greenkeeping, Club and Business Management.

Instant income for your bowls club

If you had to find instant income for your bowls club, hard cash to keep your club alive this week, where could you look?

Probably not right in front of your nose but that would be a mistake.

The successful bowling club of the future will be about a lot more than just bowling; it will be a centre for community involvement and readers of my eBook Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround will know that there are hundreds of ideas that can be applied to clubs to start the process of turning them into vibrant and thriving institutions.

Anyway, back to today’s quest: where can you look for immediate cash?

Pick up your local paper and turn to the clubs and organisations news section.

In my local paper this week, 20 different clubs and organisations had a report published and they included; Rotary, Probus, Horticultural Society, Speakers Club, various medical support groups, Inner Link, BNi, Ramblers, Wildlife Trust, Parent and Toddlers. Events were also publicised such as Whist, Bingo, Films, Quiz Nights, etc etc.

Have a look in your own local paper and invite the leader of each group along to get a free viewing of your facilities, coffee, meet the members. If one or two of these groups could change their meeting venue to your club this month, that is instant income.

Ok so you will (this is not a maybe) need to make changes to accommodate this, but view it as the start of something that will grow and the justification for the changes is much easier.

Pleasing Everybody when Saving Your Bowls Club

Not everyone will agree with your plan.

When trying to save your bowling club, it is easy to be put off or put down by people or comments from within the club.

The trouble is that you will never please everybody.

If you’ve read my Manifesto for a Successful Bowling Club you will know about the importance of making a club policy that locks in the direction you are going in at least until the consensus of opinion is changed.

If you’ve read my Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround eBook you will know about the 80/20 rule or Pareto Principle. This is a rule that turns out true for so many different areas of business and life in general that it’s hard to ignore it; simply put this principle says that 80% of the effect will be gained from 20% of the effort. It is also true that 80% of the work will be done by 20% of the people and of course that 80% of the moans, groans and negativity will come from 20% of your members.

If you set out to try to please everybody, your project will stall early.

Make sure you communicate your intentions well, and that the ideas you want to progress with are group decisions; then get them locked in to policy early on.

Communicate regularly and consistently on how progress is being made.

Expect that only 20% of the members will actively take part in the process.

Don’t be put off by the negative comments from the 20% that don’t agree with anything.

Just do your work, communicate it well and make sure to report on measurable changes frequently to show the progress you are making.

Don’t allow a clique to form, keep trying to get fresh input regardless of how hard it seems to do.

Above all keep going, it will all be worth it.

Club Turnaround Basics-Member Retention

With the continued contraction of overall membership of bowling clubs, it is clear that the clubs most likely to survive and turnaround their fortunes are the ones that have a clear strategy for membership growth and retention.

Growing bowling club membership is a big topic because it doesn’t just include getting more people in to bowl at your club as we might always have imagined. It is now vital that we not only have a clear picture of what a “member” looks like but also that we are very open minded as to what this could or should include. In Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround, I have clearly defined what I think the bowling club of the near future will look like and I go on to define what a member might be.

Anyway, back to retaining the members you already have and first a look at new members and the skill of engendering a feeling of belonging to your club. If a new member doesn’t feel that they belong to your club they will quickly leave and another subscription is lost. Building that feeling is, like it or not, the job of Read more

Bowls Green Maintenance during Winter

There has been a flurry of enquiries this week about winter maintenance practices, one of my favourite subjects as regulars will know.

Anyway, although I might not have said it all before click here for a selection of related articles.

There is also an in-depth report on winter maintenance here

Autumn Winter Report
Autumn Winter Report
in depth report detailing the essential maintenance your bowling green needs through the autumn and winter period. INSTANT DOWNLOAD ebook more details
Price: £5.97

Can we really trust the fertiliser trade?

The somewhat uncomfortable truth is that we as greenkeepers are actually part of the massive worldwide agriculture industry.

Very few products or technologies ever see the light of day based purely on the needs of bowling clubs or even the much larger golf segment of the fine turf and sports industry.

No, most of the things we use are direct descendants of agricultural or other industrial  products or at least are supported by agriculture’s huge global enterprise.

Every chemical pesticide we use is a direct copy of a product which has a use in growing crops; every fertiliser product is a result of agricultural research and manufacturing processes; even our mowers are based on a machine originally used for trimming in the massive Victorian carpet and textile industry.

Its very interesting to see as part of this discussion the current and on-going dilemma that faces farming. The burgeoning world population means that we have to grow more and more food on fewer and fewer hectares of ground. This ensures that agriculture will continue to be a cutting edge area of scientific research and that as a result we can look forward to continued and constant enticement to try out a multitude of new products and techniques on our bowls greens in the future.

However, there is one train of thought in agriculture and in society in general that is much closer to the one we need to nurture for the assured excellence of our bowls greens in the future, and that is ecological sustainability.

To accompany this goal of sustainability within agriculture there is a renewed interest in the common sense concept of healthy living soil and that is where we need to start on our road to an excellent,
high performance bowling green.

Incidentally, there is an excellent program on the BBC iplayer that explains the mechanics of soil ecology very well. You can still access it here.