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Overcoming Resistance in Bowls Club Turnaround

“Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow”

This is the common mantra of the serial procrastinator.

In bowling club turnaround terms, putting off taking action until tomorrow could be critical or even terminal for your club.

So why do so many clubs avoid taking action on such obvious problems as:

  1. falling membership numbers
  2. falling income levels
  3. increasing costs
  4. poorly performing greens
  5. crumbling buildings

The list goes on and on.

Well, the easy answer is “we don’t have enough money to improve the facilities”

But this is a self fulfilling prophecy in many respects as the lack of action on the smallest details leads to an increasing feeling of helplessness and the club slips into a downward spiral of failure.

What can be done?

The simple answer is Anything!

Doing nothing will guarantee failure.

Even if you get it wrong, you will have made a mistake you can learn from.

So in a typical club what needs to be done?

  1. Reduce Costs
  2. Maximise Income
  3. Create a business Strategy that includes a strategies for Marketing your speciality to potential users/members; users/new member sources, Delivering an outstanding experience to all of your members/users and to guarantee a consistent service delivery. To do this you will need to develop strategies for Staff and volunteer management; Financial Management and Innovation -to help you stay ahead you need to continually develop new ideas to improve what you offer (products and services) and how you deliver them to customers (processes)
  4. Eradicate Wasteful expenditure
  5. Create a system for Continuous Improvement

Finally for today your club must have a group that is dedicated to pushing this plan through, regardless of the level of resistance from internal and external sources.

This group must learn to distinguish the key differences between Projects and Actions and make sure that each project is broken down into key actions that can be taken every day to move the club’s turnaround process along on a steady path.

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

 

 

Club Turnaround Basics No.1-Wife Swapping

As leader or representative of your club this weekend why not make it your duty to track down and speak to the leader of another society or club in your town/village/vicinity; say the president of the Ramblers Club for example and follow this 5 step plan:

  1. Invite the group/club to hold their next meeting at your clubhouse.
  2. Present the President/Leader with a “Try Bowls Free” voucher (home made or even virtual) for every member.
  3. Ask if they will reciprocate with a “Try Rambling Free” voucher for your members.
  4. Ask if they would like to take advantage of the great atmosphere and hospitality at your club for their next event/end of walk refreshment as your special guests.
  5. Ask if they would like to do a reciprocal wife/husband swap: don’t worry, there’s no car keys involved; I just mean next time they are on a Ramble, why don’t all of the Ladies from your club go on the ramble with their ladies whilst your men play bowls with theirs? Next time ladies bowl while men ramble?

At your next club meeting; report the outcome of this meeting and suggest that someone else does the same with another local group asap.

This is the kind of very simple strategy that can really start to make a big difference to your club and community.

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

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.