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Category: Club

Teamwork

This week we have been looking at growing club membership and retaining current members.

One of the most important requirements for a project of this nature to be successful is a cohesive team where every member is aware of the goals and is committed to achieving success.

To work effectively and for one common goal within the club it is very important for all involved to share the same vision. This vision should be clearly defined so that all involved understand the direction in which the club is heading.

The key to achieving this level of commitment is Read more

Delivering exceptional service

Yesterday we looked at how your club might be organised in order to fulfil the expectations of its target audience and we boiled that down to a very distinct goal that any club would do well to work towards:

Deliver a little bit more than you promised!

We then went on to look at how this might be achieved consistently. We discussed how the seemingly endless task of business strategy development could be boiled down to its essence, making it a lot more tangible and do-able in the process.

Business strategy for me is about three things; three mini strategies if you like and these are people, finance and innovation.

Today, I wanted to briefly fill out these 3 bullet points to give you a clearer picture of how you can use them to your advantage and guarantee that your club members, user groups, customers or what have you, will always Read more

Differentiation

In all walks of life we see success and failure on a regular basis and we never seek to question why this happens; it’s obvious isn’t it?

One shop is successful and one fails to attract enough customers to survive; one tennis player wins Wimbledon and many others don’t; at closest quarters we see a friend narrowly lose a bowls match despite his or her best efforts and its sometimes difficult to see what they could possibly have done to beat that opponent.

Strange that we all understand this, but as a sport we are so readily accepting of the doom and gloom that says that bowling as a whole is on the downward spiral and is on the way out; whilst observing with our own eyes that some clubs are doing better than others!

Half a million bowlers aren’t about to disappear overnight, there are still plenty of opportunities for clubs who want success and longevity badly enough, but the world is a lot different today than it was in bowling’s heyday.

Differentiation; the art of making your club better and stronger should be the key goal. Ensuring that your club is an attractive proposition for as many and as diverse a set of users/members/customers as possible should be the target for every club today.

Its no longer good enough to try to attract more bowlers, set up a half hearted junior program or ignore the larger community that lives around your area.

Focus on what makes or could make your club “different” instead of what makes you the same; that’s the way to stand out from the crowd and the starting point for long term success.

Getting Started on Club Turnaround

A few readers have been in touch over the last month or so to communicate their frustration at trying to get their club turnaround project going. It seems that there is a lot of inertia among other club and/or committee members at many clubs.

Of course every club is different and the troubles experienced in getting things going will be unique to each club. However, there are a lot of similarities also so here are my top 10 tips for getting things moving:

1. Quantify the current club Read more

Bowls Club Success Manifesto

Speaking to club officials as I go around the countryside, it’s never long before the conversation turns to the difficulties in retaining members, keeping the club afloat and general club survival issues.

Of course, the time of year makes it all the worse, as clubs going into the winter with financial difficulties are obviously in a delicate condition. It’s never clear how many members will pay their subs again and want to come back next year.

For many clubs it doesn’t look great this year; the combination of the already prevalent factors related to the state of the game with the very strange series of weather events (very cold and prolonged winter, followed by a very cold and very dry spring, followed by a very hot and dry spell of weather for many of us in June and July) has left a lot of clubs with worries about their survival.

This has led me to change around my plans recently and prioritise my work to make sure you have access to the right kind of information at the right time.

So, although we said that our new eBook: Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround would be available at the end of August, we have delayed this until the 25th September, so that we could bring forward the release of our new Manifesto for Bowling Club Success.

I know, I know it’s a bit of a mouthful, but I think “manifesto” describes this new guide most accurately as it provides clubs with a document that can be adopted and then adapted into a declaration of your intention to work on a plan to rejuvenate your club’s fortunes.

Our Manifesto for Bowling Club Success includes 4 main sections as follows:

Part 1. Accepting the New Order of the Game

Part 2. Club Turnaround

Part 3. Long Term Strategic Planning

Part 4. How to Imbed Best Practice

It is available FREE now. Just click here to access your copy; and please let us know what you think and how you plan to use it in your club.