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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.

Bowls Club Membership – retention and growth released!

Membership CoverJohn’s new eBook Bowling Club Membership – retention and growth is now available for purchase here.

In this ground-breaking ebook John focusses solely on membership issues, detailing a comprehensive plan for growing your club’s membership and retaining a healthy membership level for the long term.

In this eBook John looks more closely at the subject that he first raised in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround and this book can be regarded as a partner volume to the previous eBook, as it digs deeper into the vital area of getting people through the door of your club and keeping them coming back for more, over the long term.

Right now, this is the definitive guide on re-building your club’s membership base and building a successful club for the future.

Inside your copy of Bowling Club Membership – retention and growth, you’ll discover:

  1. How to build member loyalty and how to install systems to perpetuate this.
  2. How to re-think the role your club plays in the local community and a new way to think about what constitutes a “member”.
  3. A remarkable chapter detailing a powerful method of finding new members for your club that uses tools you have at your fingertips  (and it isn’t the internet or anything computerised!)
  4. An amazingly simple but powerful formula that will ensure your club stands head and shoulders above all of your competition when it comes to excellent service.
  5.  How to build an automatic club improvement system.

So as you can see, Bowling Club Membership – retention and growth, is set to be a very important resource for Bowling Clubs everywhere, but what we’ve told you so far really is just scratching the surface. The book is also packed with actual tools you can use to achieve the remarkable changes previously outlined.

 

Using FREE to attract new members

In your exploration of methods to attract new members to your club it can be tempting to avoid free offers and deals. After all the common assumption is that if people want to come along they will just come along anyway. However, it’s entirely possible that people just don’t know enough about your club yet and removing the barriers to trying it out can make a big impact on your ability to attract new members.

A while back we discussed the impact that the rise of the internet has had on the cost of everything. In that article I finished up with a look at why things have become cheap or even free, and we discovered how very clever people are using this perception of free to promote their businesses, products and services, in the process exposing their work to a vast audience for virtually no cost.

Today I want to expand on that by asking 3 simple questions about your bowling club:

  1. How many new people (and their circle of friends, family, workmates, personal and business networks) would be made positively aware of, and have a positive opinion of your club if you offered free hire of your clubhouse for kids’ birthday parties, weddings, funerals, music nights, exhibitions, group meetings, coffee mornings, weight watchers, meditation classes, gardening groups etc etc?
  2. How popular and well thought of (and recommended to others) would your club become if it was the central focus for the village or town’s Christmas and new year celebrations, a local arts festival, a beer festival, Christmas, Spring and Autumn markets, scout meetings or even a temporary soup kitchen for the homeless in the coldest months of the year?
  3. How respected would your club become if it became a centre of excellence for everything to do with bowling?: creating and managing performance bowling greens; coaching and developing excellence in junior, county and national bowling sides; training and developing world class umpires; promoting and exhibiting cutting edge bowling club management techniques and training.

Free is the new “paid for” when it comes to promoting your club or business…but instead of giving stuff away for free you are actually gaining a huge amount of value that no amount of money could buy, so it isn’t free at all!

In that earlier article I used the example of a software seller in Australia. In the past to sell enough software to make a living she would have needed to spend a lot of money on fancy packaging, distribution, retailer profits, marketing and advertising; none of which is needed any more as the word about their excellent software spreads around the world, virally for virtually nothing as they give it away for free. If you like it and want to continue using a fully featured version then you pay for that.

This is a very honest and quality focussed way to do business. Only by filling the exact needs of the customer and responding to customer requirements will they be able to guarantee keeping that customer for the long term.

This is actually not very difficult to do if you just assume everyone you encounter is a valuable customer, either directly or indirectly; maybe now or sometime in the future. Every positive interaction that occurs between your club and anyone else is a stored up positive.

Your club can employ exactly the same techniques by thinking differently about FREE as a means of introducing people to your club.

A Bright Future for Bowls Clubs

Not an often heard statement I think you will agree.

However, I truly believe that there is such a future for bowling clubs if they take action quickly and positively to create such a future for themselves.

To do this, I think clubs will have to take a series of bold, yet very achievable steps to turn their fortunes around and then quickly build on that success to create a long term strategy that looks quite a bit different from the way things are today.

In my Free Manifesto for a Successful Bowling Club I have laid out some of my thoughts on how this can be approached.

Of course every club is different (thank goodness) and some of what I advise will be easier for some than it is for others to implement.

Anyway, the Manifesto is there for free if you’d like to see what I think on this subject.

If you agree, then please look out for my  eBook: Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround as in there I detail a concise and logical strategy that can be adapted for any club to:

  1. Stop the rot and save your club
  2. Design and Implement a solid strategy for achieving a vibrant, popular club in the days and years to come.

As usual, if you have any questions, suggestions, tips or comments please feel free to contribute here.

How to use the Winter Months to Transform your Bowling Club.

A large proportion of Bowling Clubs are currently experiencing a downturn in their fortunes.

The finances at many of these clubs just don’t make sense, yet they struggle on year after year and somehow manage to hang on, even when member numbers are ridiculously low.

This shows a determination and drive by clubs to survive regardless of how hard things get and that is to be applauded.

However, so many of these clubs needn’t be struggling in the way they are now.

Ask any bowling club member; what is the most important attribute for a bowling club to thrive and they will say: A Great Bowling Green

Why is it then that the very industry that claims to be there to support clubs in achieving better quality greens is actually just bleeding the sport dry by continually hard selling products and services to cash strapped clubs when there is very good evidence that these methods are actually detrimental to the green.

How many bowling greens have you played on that are of consistently high performance year in year out?

How many crises, have you experienced on your green in the last 20 years and how many magic remedies have you tried to fix it with? More importantly, how much cash has your club burned through  in an effort to reach the Nirvana of a high performance and reliable bowling green?

Well the answer to all of this grief is to think differently about bowling green maintenance.

For too long we have been sold the idea that a few bags of this and a bottle of that will cure all of our problems, but this is Symptom Management in action.

The real causes of poor green performance are  the underlying problems on greens perpetuated by following flawed traditions in turf maintenance, such as top-dressing.

This plays us right into the hands of the salesmen, who don’t really want things to get better in the long term.

For this weekend only I have reduced the price of our best selling eBook: Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide, in order to make sure that as many clubs as possible have access to this step by step plan for improving your bowling green for the long term.

This 100 page eBook:

  • Blows away all of the commonly held myths about bowling green maintenance.
  • Exposes the expensive greenkeeping “traditions” that run away with cash and actually harm your green.
  • Reveals an amazingly simple but powerful formula that you can follow to turn the performance of your green around starting today.
  • Details a sustainable and common sense approach to future maintenance that will allow your green to continue improving for ever more.
  • Explains what is actually going on under the surface so that you can easily measure progress at each step of the way.
  • Shows you how the majority of problems experienced on bowling greens are related very closely to just one common maintenance mistake that nearly every bowling club is making right now.
  • Leaves you with a comprehensive plan for your future maintenance, that will not only result in a high performance green, but will actually save the majority of UK clubs money on their maintenance bills.

I’ve included Performance Bowling Greens in a 72 Hour sale where you can also make great savings on all of our current publications.

If you have any questions you know you can always just drop me a line here.

Fulfilling your audience’s expectations.

The process of bowling club turnaround is divided into 7 key steps, one of which is to identify your club’s Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA), as explained and illustrated in detail in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround.

Once you have a clearly defined SCA it is this that informs all of your publicity and marketing to the user groups and individuals you hope to attract as the loyal members and customers of the future.

This Marketing activity, which should be perpetual and which needn’t cost the club much in the way of hard cash, can be thought of as “promises” being made to prospective club users.

As an aside, if you are throwing real money at advertising, promotion and publicity…please stop unless you can produce documented evidence that proves that it pays for itself in new revenue every time. Please see Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround for help with this.

So, back to promises…

If you consider your marketing as promises made, then you’d better make sure you can live up to these, because nothing disappoints more than an experience that under-delivers on your expectations.

Being good at marketing is one thing, but being good at delivering, at shipping, at getting things done well and on time every time is where you can excel at fulfilling the expectations of your newly identified audience.

This comes down to your Business Strategy and although that sounds boring and maybe even unnecessary for a bowling club you can only skip this if you are already doing very well and don’t actually need help in turning your club around, or getting more members through the door or making more revenue per visitor, in which case you probably won’t have read down this far anyway!

Business strategy at first glance looks like one of those crazy, mixed up subjects that is never ending and impossible to get your head around completely…but it comes down to just one Read more