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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

7 Ways to Grow your Bowls Club Membership

Growing bowls club membership is often considered impossible or at least very difficult.

The most likely sources of new members for your club are the existing members, their contacts and your local community.

My eBook “Bowling Club Membership, retention and growth” includes a vast number of tactics you can use to build the popularity of your club. Here are 7 for starters:

1. Add value to membership; make it a sought after commodity.
2. Cast your net wider than just the bowling community.
3. Adopt a culture of Continuous Improvement.
4. Create different Membership types
5. Ask your Members how you are doing and what they would like to see.
6. Open your facilities to local groups
7. Interact on a professional basis with your local business community.

Bowling Club Membership Retention and Growth details a step by step a strategy for uncovering a huge un-tapped resource of potential members and income for your club.

Use this Coupon Code at the checkout to get it for half price: “member50”

Bowling Club Membership retention and growth
Bowling Club Membership retention and growth
How do you increase club membership numbers in a time of economic turmoil? How do you retain members when there is a natural decline in bowling participation? This eBook sets out a plan for transforming any bowls club into the central hub of its community. FREE download for Academy Members more details
Price: £9.97

Bowls and Buddhism

Listening to the national news either on the radio in the car or on TV, it seems that we are at the height of summer and everyone is still on holiday.

Of course this pretty much is the case for a large proportion of the UK population, but here in Perthshire I can reveal that it is Autumn or very close to it. The kids have all been back to school for 2 weeks and the farmers are planting their over wintering crops. There has been heavy dew on the grass in the mornings, at least when it hasn’t been raining!…and this morning a heavy mist hung low over the fields.

This serves as a stark reminder that it is time to arrange the work for the Autumn renovation program on the bowling green, regardless of how summery you are feeling.

As an aside I was watching a program about Buddhism last night and was reminded that the Buddhist strives to reach a state known as “Nirvana” in his or her life. However, the presenter recognised that there were many different views among the Buddhist community about what “Nirvana” was.

This set me thinking about what Nirvana would look like for the average UK bowling club; and unlike last nights presenter I was able to put my finger right on it:

Nirvana = a consistently high performance bowling green and a thriving, financially secure club.

Now for the hard bit; how do we achieve Nirvana in our bowling clubs?

Well in a short post like this I can’t even start to cover all of the how’s, where’s, what’s and why’s of trying to reach this state, and anyway this has been set out in great detail in Performance Bowling Greens and Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround, but I can give very concise advice on how to get started on both parts of this ultimate goal this autumn:

Cancel the Top Dressing Order.

How will this help your club on its way to Nirvana?

  1. It will leave £1000 or more in the club coffers that would otherwise have gone towards perpetuating the folly that many many clubs have bought into over the last two decades.
  2. It will start you off on the road to creating a healthy, living, high performance green. If you are new to the site, type “top dressing” into the search box at the top of the page to get further comprehensive advice on this subject.

Over the next week we will be adding a heap of new free resources to the Members area to help with Autumn and Winter projects on the green and in the club.

 

 

Club Turnaround Success Story

I recently received this inspiring message from one of our Bowls Mastermind Network Members that I know will be of great interest to many of you:

Dear John

I am chairman of a Bowling Club that has risen from the ashes and I thought your other readers might like to hear how we did it!

 Four years ago we reached the dreaded October with no money (not a penny) and 30 members.

The club opened every Friday evening for a ‘social evening’……but this was frequented by half a dozen regulars for a drink and a chat ie. not very useful!

I took over as Chairman, because nobody else would, since then I have had carte blanche over club affairs.

Next to our club is the local Leisure Centre with two indoor rinks.

We started evening roll ups indoors followed by quizzes/ bingo in our club during the winter.

In the summer we have roll ups outdoors every Friday tied to a competition with the best 8 scores counting followed by the inevitable quizzes and other entertainments.

This format has lifted our turnover to some £15,000 over the last two years.

As an aside we had all our machinery stolen in that dreaded October 4 years ago due to a very insecure and neglected Machine Building.

With the insurance claim and our new found turnover we have spent some £25,000 over the last 3 years on everything the club needs.

Without warning the indoor rinks have been closed this year which threatens attendance during our winter period.

Our answer to this is to supplement our winter entertainment with professional acts every 3 weeks or so. (Single singers/comedians/magicians etc at an average cost of £150).

The extra cost of this will be offset with an entry fee of £2 or £3 per member….we expect between 40 and 50 members each Friday. We can only accommodate this number comfortably.

Currently the membership is well over 70 and still rising.

We have a much higher local profile and make use of all the local organisations to our own ends.

Finally, honest!, due to all the above our success on the green has seen 2 unprecedented years.

I feel as though I have taken your advice without knowing it which is a little spooky!!

Good Luck with the website, I will certainly stick around for the foreseeable future.

Cheers

 Name withheld by request

If anyone else has a story to share please get in touch.

Can any old Tom, Dick or Harry produce a Performance Bowls Green?

 

In a previous post I was talking about the 4 barriers to success that I regularly encounter at bowling clubs. These were Desperation (for a good green), Traditions (that aren’t as traditional as we think sometimes), Myths (not dragons and wizards, but greenkeeping myths) and of course Consistency or rather the lack of it.

Well today I want to tell you a story about a typical bowling club. Just for the record this isn’t based on any one club, but is a very common pattern of events. If you are a bowling club member, you might instantly recognise this pattern and think I am talking about your club, but I assure you I’m not. If you are a bowling club member and this doesn’t ring any bells, then I would put money on your green being the best in your area, that you have a thriving membership and everything at your club is rosy. If that’s the case you are to be congratulated. To the story then:

Back in the late 1970’s our bowling club was doing ok, membership was thriving and the green was playing well. The greenkeeper, who we’ll call Tom, was an enthusiastic amateur and up until that point he had the full backing of the membership, he was Read more